“As an adjudicated insurrectionist, Trump is an illegitimate president according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore every official act as president will be illegitimate.”
–Mike Zonta, co-editor of OccupySF.net
The 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Call your Congressperson and your U.S. Senators at (202) 224-3121
Paul McAllister and Johnny Desert Jun 28, 2026 San Francisco’s Barbary Coast ran for nearly seventy years on a three-block stretch of Pacific Street — longer than any red-light district in American history. It began in the chaos of the 1849 Gold Rush, when the city’s population exploded from under five hundred to over twenty-five thousand in two years and abandoned ships were sunk in Yerba Buena Cove to claim the mud beneath them as real estate. What followed was a neighborhood built entirely on extraction: gambling halls where half a million dollars sat on the tables, a shanghaiing trade that kidnapped men into forced labor at sea, and a vice economy so profitable that the city’s own politicians had no interest in shutting it down. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire leveled every saloon and brothel on the Coast — and within a year, they were all rebuilt. In the district’s final act, African American musicians at clubs like Purcell’s So Different Café invented the dance crazes that swept the nation, from the Texas Tommy to the Turkey Trot, making Pacific Street one of the birthplaces of American jazz. The Barbary Coast survived vigilantes, earthquakes, and six major fires. It was finally killed by a newspaper editorial and a police commission resolution banning dancing. Today the same blocks are Jackson Square — San Francisco’s first historic district, home to Michelin-starred restaurants and tech firms paying tens of millions for the brick-and-iron buildings where crimps once dropped drugged sailors through trap doors. Sources Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld (1933) Tom Stoddard, Jazz on the Barbary Coast (Heyday Books, 1982; rev. 1998) San Francisco Heritage, “Heritage in the Neighborhoods: Jackson Square” series (sfheritage.org, June 2025) Gary Kamiya, “Depravity of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast Was Legendary,” San Francisco Examiner (2023) FoundSF, “Barbary Coast” and “Shanghaiing” entries (foundsf.org) Sid LeProtti oral history recordings, Columbia Records / San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation Collection (1953; digitized at Stanford University)
They weren’t famous. They were not obviously brave. Otto Hampel was a factory worker who had fought in the First World War. Elise Hampel was a domestic servant who had, until a few years earlier, belonged to the National Socialist Women’s League. They lived in a working-class apartment in Wedding, a Berlin neighborhood, in a building ordinary enough that nothing about them caught the eye. They were, by every outward measure, precisely the kind of people whose lives do not appear in history books.
In 1940, Elise’s brother was killed in France. Something in her broke, and something in Otto broke alongside it. They did not have a platform. They did not belong to any resistance organization. They were not connected to the White Rose or to any underground network. What they had was a kitchen table, a stack of postcards, a pen, and a decision.
Starting in September of that year, and for the next two years, Otto and Elise Hampel hand-wrote more than two hundred postcards denouncing Hitler and the Nazi regime. The messages were plain. Refuse military service. Refuse to donate to the Winter Relief. Refuse to cooperate. One card, written across a stamp bearing Hitler’s face, read simply: worker murderer. Another read, Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too.
They dropped the cards in mailboxes. They left them in stairwells. They walked their own city, an ordinary couple on an ordinary errand, and scattered the truth like seeds.
Here is the part that will break your heart. Nearly every postcard was turned in to the Gestapo immediately. The people who found them were terrified, to be caught with such a card was to be marked. So they handed them in. Card after card. The Gestapo, reading them, became convinced it was tracking a communist spy ring, a sophisticated underground network. The idea that two working-class people at a kitchen table were producing all of this, alone, for two years, did not occur to them.
For two years, Otto and Elise Hampel risked their lives every week. They believed that somewhere, somehow, someone was reading. They believed the seeds would find soil. They didn’t know that almost every card they wrote was going directly into a Gestapo file. They didn’t know their campaign, by any immediate measure, was failing.
They were arrested in October 1942. Otto told the police he was happy to have protested against Hitler. Roland Freisler’s People’s Court convicted them of preparing for high treason and demoralizing the troops. On April 8, 1943, Otto and Elise were guillotined at Plötzensee Prison within hours of each other.
Sit with the part of this story that feels like defeat. They didn’t overthrow Hitler. They didn’t start a movement. They did not, as far as they ever knew, move a single reader. They went to their deaths with no evidence that their two years of quiet, terrified, unglamorous work had mattered to anyone at all.
And yet.
After the war, the German novelist Hans Fallada was handed their Gestapo file. He wrote a novel based directly on what they did, published in English as Every Man Dies Alone, and in the UK as Alone in Berlin. The file itself survived. Their mug shots, their handwriting, their confessions, and several of the actual postcards were contained in it. Schoolchildren in Germany study them. A plaque now marks the place they lived. Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson played them in a 2016 film. Eighty years later, I am sitting down to write to you about them.
The regime they opposed is gone. The people who turned in their postcards are forgotten. The Hampels are not.
You will be told – I’m sure you have already been told – that you are too small to matter. That you are not famous enough, not positioned enough, not important enough for your refusal to make a difference. The Hampels were less positioned than you are. They had postcards. You have more than that. The question they answered at their kitchen table, and the question in front of you now, is not whether your witness will be measurable in your lifetime. It is whether you will stand witness anyway.
They didn’t know, when the guillotine fell, that we would be speaking their names. They acted anyway. That is the whole lesson. The meaning of a small refusal is not what it accomplishes in the week you make it. The meaning is that it enters the record of what human beings did when it was hard. Someone, later, will find it. Someone always does.
To read more: Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone (Melville House, 2009). The U.S. edition includes an extraordinary appendix reproducing pages from the actual Gestapo file – the Hampels’ mug shots, their handwriting, several of the original postcards. In the UK the same novel was published as Alone in Berlin. The 2016 film Alone in Berlin, starring Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson, is faithful to the arc of the story and a fine ninety-minute introduction. For a concise historical account, the couple’s Wikipedia entry under “Otto and Elise Hampel” is solid and well-sourced.
Staffing cuts, a boarding crisis, and an $809 million surplus. To employees, the question isn’t whether UCSF can fix its emergency department — it’s whether it wants to.
Liver transplant patient Kelsey M. walked out of the emergency department at UCSF Parnassus against medical advice because she was afraid that staying would lead to her death. | Source:Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard
As a lifelong liver transplant patient, Kelsey M. knows her body the way a navigator knows ocean currents.
Through frequent blood draws, she tracks a panel of enzymes to see whether the organ is functioning or close to failure. So when results came back in early December — each reading higher than any since she received the transplant as a baby 35 years ago — she knew she needed immediate care.
The symptoms were telling enough. She couldn’t keep food or water down. She was doubling over in pain. Someone on her UCSF transplant team told her to go to the emergency department at Parnassus. Her records were there, her specialists walked those floors.
She packed the essentials: enzyme-replacement pills to help her eat, a phone charger, a change of clothes, an N95 mask.
Four hours later, she was in a bed and hospital gown, fluids flowing through a port in her chest. But she was in a shared room, with only a curtain separating her from someone on a breathing machine, battling an apparent respiratory illness.
What might have been uncomfortable to other patients posed a grave threat to Kelsey. Since she was only months old when she got a new liver, she was too young for live vaccines before the surgery and too immunocompromised after to ever receive them.
When the man on the other side of the curtain started coughing, she stepped out of the room.
“A nurse said, ‘You can’t be here in the hallway,’ and I said, ‘I can’t be in the room with this guy.’”
Kelsey wears a mask when she checks herself into the UCSF Parnassus ER. | Source:Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The StandardSince receiving a transplant as a baby, Kelsey has been severely immunocompromised. | Source:Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard
The nurse brought her a chair, saying there were no beds and the hospital was full. A transfer to another facility was the only option. A doctor told her she could die if she left; she felt she could die if she didn’t.
“I was too scared to stay,” Kelsey said.
Against medical advice, she walked out.
Rare patient, common ordeal
Kelsey, who asked to withhold her surname, is a medical anomaly.
As an infant transplant patient who came off anti-rejection drugs at 16, she’s rare living proof that the immune system can accept a new organ without medication. That made her valuable to researchers. A UCSF-led clinical trial(opens in new tab) recruited her last year to try to understand why.
At the Parnassus emergency department, though, she’s one of thousands each year who walk out before being evaluated or treated by a licensed provider.
UCSF Health officials have maintained that the problems at its flagship emergency department aren’t unique to Parnassus. To a degree, that’s true(opens in new tab). A 2023 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association documented a decade of statewide deterioration: numbers of emergency visits rising, emergency rooms closing, severe cases surging.
Workers in the emergency department say the long wait times and high walkout rates are a result of understaffing and crowded conditions. | Source:Manuel Orbegozo for The Standard
Still, Parnassus stands apart on several measures. As a quaternary referral center(opens in new tab), the facility exists to treat patients too sick or complex for anywhere else, operating as the last stop for the rarest, most complicated cases.
However, publicly reported data show that emergency room patients in Parnassus are increasingly likely to wait longer for care, or to simply walk out without seeing a doctor, compared with other hospitals in San Francisco. Patient complaints at the hospital are five times higher than the state average.
State records analyzed by The Standard show that the Parnassus emergency department logged the highest walkout rate in San Francisco last year: 5.6% of patients left without seeing a licensed physician. In 2025, 2,243 people left, up 4.6% from 1,872 in 2024, while patient volume continued to hover around 40,000 annual visits.
Skye Perryman — President & CEO of Democracy Forward and TIME 100 honoree — makes the case that defending democracy isn’t the job of lawyers or politicians alone — it’s a role for every one of us.
“This book is for all of us, regardless of your politics.” —Michael Steele★“Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times will help to restore the power of every reader.” —Gloria Steinem★“The rare book that captures why this moment is so urgent — and then hands you something to do about it.” —Reshma Saujani★“A must read and must do.” —Stacey Abrams★“Exactly the book this moment demands — and she’s written it for all of us.” —Dolores Huerta★“Skye Perryman offers not more angst and the obvious, but real direction.” —Annie & Willie Nelson★“An inspiring and empowering guide for every American.” —Governor JB Pritzker★“A manual for people who are tired of wringing their hands and are ready to roll up their sleeves.” —Hillary Clinton★
“This book is for all of us, regardless of your politics.” —Michael Steele★“Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times will help to restore the power of every reader.” —Gloria Steinem★“The rare book that captures why this moment is so urgent — and then hands you something to do about it.” —Reshma Saujani★“A must read and must do.” —Stacey Abrams★“Exactly the book this moment demands — and she’s written it for all of us.” —Dolores Huerta★“Skye Perryman offers not more angst and the obvious, but real direction.” —Annie & Willie Nelson★“An inspiring and empowering guide for every American.” —Governor JB Pritzker★“A manual for people who are tired of wringing their hands and are ready to roll up their sleeves.” —Hillary Clinton★
MORE THAN A BOOK
A Guide for All of Us
The future of our country lies in all of our hands. Drawing on her frontline experience challenging threats to democracy in courtrooms across the nation, Skye Perryman combines gripping personal stories with practical how-to guides that empower readers to take action in their own communities — from protecting voting rights and public schools to finding courage in the face of fear.
Accessible, hopeful, and deeply practical, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times shows that the path forward begins not in the halls of power — but at our kitchen tables, in our neighborhoods, and through the everyday choices we make to speak up, build community, and protect our future.
INSIDE THE BOOK
Seven Actions Everyone Can Take
01: Stop Spiraling & Pick Up a Shovel
02: Achieve Information Sobriety
03: Begin at Your Front Door
04: Practice Tailgate Accountability
05: Get Serious About Fear, Courage, & Joy
06: Remember the Past, Fight for the Future
07: Keep Going, the Only Way Out Is Through
The Only Way Out is Through
When fear and confusion are the point, the most powerful thing any of us can do is refuse to look away — and to act.
This book is for anyone who wants to know where to start.
Skye Perryman is the President and CEO of Democracy Forward, a national legal organization that advances democracy and progress in the courts. Named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, she is a leader in the largest affirmative litigation effort against executive branch overreach in United States history.
Known for blending legal expertise with accessible, inspiring storytelling, she is a frequent commentator on NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and NPR, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, TIME, and Newsweek. A proud product of K–12 public schools in Waco, Texas, she holds degrees from Baylor University and Georgetown University Law Center.
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I started writing this book when it became undeniably clear, as our history also teaches, that it is not our institutions that will save us—not the courts, not corporate generosity, not the universities, not the media—but it is the people.
Paramedics at the emergency room of the Medical University of Lausitz Carl Thiem are lifting a stretcher carrying a patient out of their ambulance in Southern Brandenburg, Germany on Sunday, June 28, 2026. There has been an increase in emergency calls due to heat-related illnesses.
(Photo by Frank Hammerschmidt/picture alliance via Getty Images)
“It’s time to turn the heat on the fossil fuel giants that caused this heatwave but are doing nothing to cover the costs.”
The head of the World Health Organization on Sunday said the deadly heat wave now boiling across Europe—which French authorities say caused more than 1,000 deaths last week alone—is the predicted and horrifying result that climate scientists and human rights advocates have been warning about for decades.
In a social post Sunday, WHO secretary-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “Driven by climate change and global warming, the phenomenon of the ‘once-in-a-generation’ heatwave is now occurring nearly annual. We were warned.”
Citing over 1,300 excess deaths across Europe in the last week—as temperatures broke records in nation after nation—Tedros added that “heat stress is often called the ‘silent killer’—and European homes, workplaces and schools were not built for these temperatures.”
“Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth, heating at twice the global average,” he said. “Right now 150 million people are living under extreme heat, hundreds have died, schools are shut, grids are buckling.”
According to the Associated Press:
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Germany marked a new record for the third day in a row with 41.7 degrees Celsius (107 degrees Fahrenheit) in Neißemünde, near the border with Poland. The Czech Republic also experienced its hottest day ever with 41.1 C (106.4 F).
A new study from the World Weather Attribution, a Europe-based collaboration of scientists, reported Friday that the record-breaking heat and humidity in Europe this past week would not have been possible without climate change.
The rapid study found that the heat would have been virtually impossible just five decades ago, and is 200 times more likely today than it would have been 20 years ago.
On Sunday, authorities in France said over 1,000 excess deaths attributable to the heat were recorded last week, with at least 100 or more over the previous 24 hours.
Just when you think you'll get a break from this intense heat, a 3rd major heatwave is on the way & forecasts suggest it may be even worse. #Spain could see temps of 46°C, #France 45°C & the #UK near 40°C again. This is the new climate & one we are dangerously underprepared for. pic.twitter.com/8MvXUjnbO7
The threat of extreme heat related to the climate crisis is not only in Europe.
In 2024, a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of the American Medical Associationshowed that heat-related deaths in the United States rose 117% between 1999 and 2023.
Last year, a joint analysis by The Guardian and Pro Publica estimated that the industry-friendly policies of US President Donald Trump could result in the otherwise preventable deaths of 1.3 million people worldwide over the next 80 years, most of them among poor people in nations that did very little to cause the planetary crisis driven by the consumption of fossil fuels.
In a comment last week, as the deadly heatwave made international headlines, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was among those who pointed his finger directly at Trump for his vicious policies related to energy and climate.
“There is a record-breaking heat wave in Europe and hundreds are dying,” said Sanders. “There is drought all across America and farmers are going out of business. Yet, Trump thinks climate change is a ‘hoax’ and cuts funding for sustainable energy. Insane. He is threatening the very future of our planet.”
On Friday, the climate group 350.org said the polluting companies, namely those in the coal, oil, and gas industry, should be made to pay for the deaths and damage they have caused and continue to cause.
“It’s time to turn the heat on the fossil fuel giants that caused this heatwave but are doing nothing to cover the costs,” said Lisa Rose, a campaigner with the group. “Both science and the law are clear: polluters must answer for climate damage. Now it’s up to our leaders to make them pay.”
“Forcing fossil fuel companies to cut emissions and pay their fair share is the only effective lasting response,” she added. “Half-measures won’t cool this crisis, only a faster shift to renewables can.”
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As the disastrous saga surrounding President Donald Trump’s efforts to make the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC more, uh, reflective—the democratic socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani brought more fresh joy to his city on Saturday by jumping into one of the city’s public pools—fully dressed in a suit and tie—with a smile on his face.
The scenes could not be more symbolically divergent as critics of the mess Trump has created in DC—where ducks are reportedly dying, a mysterious number of people have now been given criminal citations, fences have been erected, and an “Orwellian” recording telling people they are not allowed to “loiter” in one of the nation’s capital’s most iconic parks—reached new levels of absurdity over recent days.
Meanwhile, as Trump’s claims of arrests made amid unproven allegations of “vandalism” are being met with growing suspicion and derision, this was Mayor Mamdani as he joined with city residents to celebrate the beginning of the summer pool season:
https://twitter.com/i/status/2070885003047706857
“Mamdani kicked off NYC’s outdoor pool season today by jumping into the Thomas Jefferson Pool in East Harlem!” declared the photographer who took the video. “This year marks the 90th anniversary of New York City’s iconic WPA-era outdoor pools. Summer is officially here!”
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The parks department is honoring the 90th anniversary of the summer of 1936, when then-Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and city Parks Commissioner Robert Moses opened 11 large pools across the five boroughs. They served as a place to cool off during the Great Depression — and were part of a wave of New York City public works projects funded by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration.
Mamdani has been running on a political high in recent weeks. After leading joyful celebrations of the New York Knicks becoming NBA world champions after a 53-year drought, the democratic socialist mayor also claimed big political victories this week with a trifecta win for the congressional candidates he endorsed in the Democratic primary on Tuesday as well as a city council vote that delivered on his campaign promise to freeze rent for city residents.
“We’re so excited to be celebrating 90 years of public swimming in our city,” Mamdani told reporters after his fully-dressed dip. “This is a moment that New Yorkers are celebrating across the five boroughs.”
A fence surrounds the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on June 26, 2026 in Washington, DC. An increased law enforcement presence has been around the area after claims made by President Trump that vandalism was the cause of the damage. (Photo by Andrew Leyden/Getty Images)
Earlier this month, Mamdani and NYC Parks Commissioner Tricia Shimamura announced the opening of registration for an expanded number of free summer Learn to Swim classes at 18 outdoor pools across the city.
“Every child deserves to enjoy the water safely,” Mamdani said at the time. “That’s why we’re expanding free swim lessons across the five boroughs—giving more young New Yorkers access to an essential life skill, saving families money and making sure every child feels confident in the water.”
“He’s in the running as best mayor NYC has ever had,” said filmmaker Jesse Newman in response to Saturday’s footage from Harlem. “Look out LaGuardia.”
In the nation’s capital, however, “dystopian” scenes continued as National Guard troops continued to guard the Reflecting Pool at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial from anyone who might “touching the water” as a so-called “surveillance machine” told passersby that “Loitering is not permitted in this area. Please proceed to a designated location.”
https://twitter.com/i/status/2070637280721506429
“This is absolutely insane,” exclaimed Allegria Harpootlian, who works for the ACLU, in a social media post. “What is a park meant for if not for ‘loitering’?”
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The congresswoman has a strong track record of backing winners this cycle — but she’s emerging from controversy after sitting out key races in her home state.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., at the U.S. Capitol on March 25, 2026. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
After rattling some observers by staying out of a slew of competitive congressional primaries in her home state this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., endorsed a candidate in Tennessee on Thursday.
Ocasio-Cortez is backing Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson in the 9th Congressional District, which will be a tough win for Democrats after Republicans scrambled to gerrymander it earlier this year thanks to the Supreme Court’s gutting of a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. The district covering parts of Memphis and its suburbs is one of more than a dozen that Republicans have redrawn at President Donald Trump’s demand to ward off what many in the GOP see as the increasingly likely prospect that they lose both congressional chambers to Democrats in November.
An endorsement from democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez is a coveted stamp of approval for progressive insurgents looking to challenge incumbents or capture open congressional seats. She has endorsed several Democratic primary candidates running for open seats in other states this cycle including Chris Rabb, who won his primary in Pennsylvania; Analilia Mejia, who won in New Jersey; and Junaid Ahmed, who lost his primary in Illinois. But critics raised eyebrows at her decision to stay out of key congressional primaries in New York; she opted instead to endorse a slate of democratic socialist candidates in the state Assembly.
The endorsement is a major boost to Pearson, who is also backed by Justice Democrats, the progressive group that first backed Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 against longtime incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Pearson originally launched his campaign with the intention of ousting two-decade incumbent Rep. Steve Cohen, the last remaining Democrat in Tennessee’s congressional delegation. Cohen dropped out of the race in May after state lawmakers split up his district into three neighboring districts, saying it was “drawn to beat” him.
Observers theorized that Ocasio-Cortez’s absence from New York’s congressional primaries reflected a desire not to butt heads with Democratic Party leaders who endorsed against leftist challengers, potentially signaling her plans to run for higher office in a future cycle. Others argued that she stayed out to split her efforts with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to maximize the left’s political currency in a cycle with historic outside spending against their candidates. Mamdani emerged as a kingmaker in Tuesday’s elections, backing three congressional candidates who won their primaries on Tuesday: socialists Clare Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, and progressive Brad Lander, and several — but not all — of the New York City DSA’s endorsed candidates.
On Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez said the left’s wins in New York’s House primaries were part of both “a moment” and “a movement” of voters demanding more from the Democratic Party after major losses in 2024.
Endorsing in the races would have pitted Ocasio-Cortez against her congressional colleagues whose support she might need in a run for higher office, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, poised to become House speaker if the Democrats retake the chamber in November. She’s made most of her other endorsements this cycle in open seats with no incumbent, including Rabb, Mejia, Ahmed, Adelita Grijalva in Arizona, Adam Hamawy in New Jersey, and Sam Forstag in Montana. She endorsed Democratic candidate Randy Villegas against the incumbent Republican, Rep. David Valadao, in California. Her former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, said her decision not to endorse him likely contributed to his loss in an open California primary to replace retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., by fueling attacks from his opponents.
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In New York City, Avila Chevalier and Lander ousted incumbents backed by Jeffries and Democratic leaders: Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat and Rep. Dan Goldman. Valdez won her primary in an open seat where retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez had endorsed her preferred successor, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Velázquez bemoaned Mamdani’s endorsement of Valdez against her pick in the months leading up to the race. And even after their candidates lost on Tuesday, Jeffries and other party leaders aired their disappointment in Mamdani’s decision to go against them.
But in Tennessee, Pearson emerged as the frontrunner when the incumbent dropped out. He’s hoping to tap into voters’ frustrations with both parties by campaigning on economic change for the working class — a message that boosted both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. Share
I’M BEN MUESSIG, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.
That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?
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In the mythology of history, 1776 belongs to Philadelphia: declarations, rebellion and the birth of the United States. Yet on the far edge of a continent the revolutionaries hadn’t fully imagined, another founding was quietly unfolding that same year.
While Thomas Jefferson drafted ideals of liberty and self-government in the East, Spanish conquistadors and Franciscan missionaries were establishing a tiny outpost beside one of the world’s greatest natural harbors. That settlement would become San Francisco.
The coincidence is more than historical trivia. It is a revealing dual narrative about the American experiment itself: one founding devoted to principles, the other to possibility.
The United States was born from an argument about freedom. San Francisco was born from geography, ambition and grit. Together, they tell the story of a nation forever oscillating between ideals and reinvention.
In 1776, the future San Francisco — located on the ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people — was mainly known for windblown dunes and rolling hills.
Then, Spain — worried about Russian and British encroachment on the Pacific coast — moved to secure Alta California. That summer, colonists established the Presidio of San Francisco and Mision San Francisco de Asis, today better known as Mission Dolores.
Mere days before the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence, Juan Bautista de Anza planted a cross in the ground establishing the Presidio on the bluffs above the Pacific. The contrast between the two foundings could not have been sharper.
The American Revolution announced itself with soaring language about equality and liberty. San Francisco’s founding emerged from empire. One was loudly ideological; the other deeply pragmatic — but over the centuries, San Francisco would evolve into perhaps the most vivid expression of the very ideals articulated in Philadelphia.
For most of its early life, San Francisco remained obscure. No one could have predicted that this remote village would one day become one of the most influential cities on Earth. Then came 1848.
The discovery of gold transformed San Francisco almost overnight from a sleepy port into a global magnet for ambition, becoming — in a matter of years — the most cosmopolitan place west of New York.
The California Gold Rush did more than enrich prospectors. It created a civic culture built around reinvention. In older societies, identity often depended on class, ancestry or inherited status. In San Francisco, identity became fluid. Here, a laborer could become a merchant, a refugee could become a restaurateur, and an immigrant could become a titan of industry.
The City rewarded audacity more than pedigree. That ethos still defines San Francisco today.
The rest of America often imagines San Francisco as a place of contradictions: radical and wealthy, bohemian and corporate, idealistic and relentlessly ambitious. But beneath these polarities lies a coherent civic philosophy.
San Francisco has long believed that talent matters more than origins and that the future belongs to those willing to invent it. That is the deeper connection between the two foundings of 1776.
The founders of the United States envisioned a society in which individuals were not permanently trapped by aristocracy or inherited hierarchy. Their vision was incomplete and deeply flawed in practice, especially in a nation still burdened by slavery and exclusion.
But the democratic aspiration was revolutionary: Ordinary people could shape their own destinies. San Francisco became one of the ultimate realizations of that aspiration.
The City’s history is a procession of outsiders arriving with little and building something transformative. Chinese railroad workers and merchants helped define its commercial and cultural identity despite fierce discrimination. LGBTQ communities found refuge and political power in San Francisco decades before much of America accepted them. Artists, activists and entrepreneurs repeatedly turned our home into a laboratory for social and technological change.
And then came Silicon Valley.
Though the region geographically exists outside the city limits, the Bay Area spawned a technological revolution over the 20th century that cemented San Francisco’s place in the global imagination as the cradle of innovation. The personal computer, the internet economy, social media, artificial intelligence and venture capital culture all carry the unmistakable imprint of San Francisco’s frontier mentality.
This place has always attracted people who believe the world can be remade.
Congress passed the laws. Previous presidents signed them. The Supreme Court has now declared they can be ignored whenever this particular president chooses (but not Biden)…
Something happened inside the Supreme Court chamber on Thursday that almost never happens: Justice Sonia Sotomayor was so disgusted by what the six radical, on-the-take Republican appointees had just done that she read her dissent aloud from the bench, and Justice Samuel Alito, who’d written the majority opinion, snapped back at her in real time, a breach of the Court’s normally stage-managed decorum that left veteran reporters in the room visibly startled in slack-jawed amazement.
On the surface they were fighting about asylum seekers. But Sotomayor understood, as Alito surely did, that the real question wasn’t who gets to cross the border: it was whether the laws Congress writes still mean anything once a neofascist, imperial president (like Alito and his peers want) decides he’d rather not follow them because he’s above the law.
Back in 1980, a bipartisan Congress passed the Refugee Act to bring American law in line with our promise not to send the persecuted back to be killed, and it laid out a specific, mandatory set of steps.
Under the law Congress wrote that year, a noncitizen who reaches our border and says she fears persecution gets referred for an asylum interview to determine the legitimacy of her fear of violence or death in her home country or the country she’s fleeing. The word Congress chose to write into the law was the administration “shall,” not “may,” hold that hearing and a judge “shall” make that determination.
On Thursday the Republicans on the Court, however, ruled that Trump can erase or effectively ignore that law by simply ordering border agents to physically block people on the Mexican (or, presumably, Canadian or at an airport arrival) side of the line, so they never technically “arrive in the United States” and the law never kicks in.
Sotomayor called the reasoning illogical, because it is. A person standing at the threshold of a port of entry has plainly arrived. The Republican Trump toadies on the Court, however, pretended otherwise so Trump’s racial enforcers could essentially ignore both the intention and the letter of the law that elected members from both parties in Congress wrote.
The second ruling is even worse, albeit quieter.
Congress (whose job is to write laws for the United States) created Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in 1990 for people who can’t safely go home, and it built in court review of whether an administration followed the required procedures before yanking that status away.
The Trump administration recently tried to strip TPS protections from hundreds of thousands of Black Haitians and brown-skinned Syrians as part of its “Make America White Again” program, and multiple lower courts found it had ignored those procedures the law requires, noting that Trump’s Haiti decision, in particular, was tainted by racial animus (hate of Black people from what Trump calls “shithole countries”).
As Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog wrote about Justice Elana Kagan’s reaction:
“Kagan called it ‘plain to see’ that race played a role in the decision to terminate the TPS designation for Haiti. ‘The evidence’ that the Haiti TPS beneficiaries ‘have offered,’ she stressed, ‘includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.’ But those ‘statements fairly shout,’ she said, ‘in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.’”
The Republican majority didn’t even bother to say if the Trump regime had or had not complied with the plain letter and clear intent of the law Congress passed. Instead, the six corrupt Republicans on the Court declared that no court anywhere in America is allowed to even ask if Trump, et al, are breaking that particular law (an oversight process by a court called “judicial review”).
As the American Immigration Council pointed out, that means even an openly illegal decision is now insulated from any review by any judge in the country, closing the courthouse door in a way that, in my opinion, even the most conservative of the Founders would have found astonishing and plainly unconstitutional.
Congress, in other words, wrote a law that told the courts to check the legitimacy of asylum seekers claims to determine if they can or cannot stay here and apply for legal status; writing such laws is what the Constitution requires of an elected Congress.
But the six radical justices that rightwing billlionaires have spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to get on the Supreme Court told all the rest of the courts in America to simply look away and ignore the law. They’re not allowed to enforce it any more, even though Congress passed it and a president signed it.
Robert Reich put his finger on it yesterday afternoon, noting in his excellent newsletter that:
“[A] majority of the current Supreme Court — the abominable Roberts Court — has bent over backwards to ignore those laws.
“This must be seen for what it really is — a systemic effort by the six Republican appointees on the court to shrink congressional authority and enlarge the authority of the executive branch.
“If there was any doubt before, there should be none now: The Supreme Court is part of the anti-democracy movement led by Trump and the billionaires behind him.”
This agreement with Trump’s racist efforts to purge America of Black and brown refugees aren’t only losses for those would-be immigrants. As Reich points out, these decisions are stripping power from Congress, from the basic idea that the people’s elected representatives get to write laws that the Constitution requires a president to obey.
The Court’s defenders will tell you I’m being unfair in that assessment, claiming that the justices are just neutral umpires reading statutes as written. But that’s a lie, and recent history proves it.
Just a few years later, the same conservative bloc reasoned its way to blocking Joe Biden’s student debt relief, insisting Congress would never hand a president that kind of authority without saying so in unmistakable language.
When a Democratic president acts, in other words, they read laws Congress has passed with a magnifying glass and demand crystal-clear permissions. But when Trump (or, presumably, future Republican presidents) wants to shred the asylum process or wants his immigration purges of nonwhite people placed beyond the reach of any judge, the magnifying glass disappears and the words suddenly bend whichever way Trump wants.
These six lawyers in robes started from the outcome that today’s captured hard-right MAGA Republican Party and its white supremacist Dear Leader wants and reverse-engineered their reasoning to reach it, and the reasoning changes from case to case because the only thing that has to stay fixed is who wins.
As Sotomayor wrote, pointing to that magnifying glass in her dissent to yesterday’s Mullin v. Al Otro Lado decision:
“The Court’s illogical interpretation [of Congress’ written law] is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: ‘in.’”
And the consequences of these decisions aren’t merely academic: people will die because of the actions these corrupt Republicans just took allowing the President and his whiteness enforcers to ignore the statutes that Congress wrote, both parties passed, and presidents signed into law. As Sotomayor also wrote in her dissent:
“One woman who had fled Honduras after receiving death threats from gang members was beaten, cut, and knocked unconscious by an unknown man after being turned back from a port of entry. Another asylum seeker who was turned back at a port three times was later raped in the presence of her child.
“Those living in migrant camps were subjected to break-ins, robberies, and assaults, ‘fac[ing] serious harm at the hands of criminal organizations, including kidnapping, extortion, physical violence, and sexual assault.’ Some were ‘murdered in Mexico while waiting for an opportunity to be processed by U. S. officials.’
“Desperate to flee these conditions and secure the opportunity to apply for asylum, ‘[s]ome attempted to reach U. S. soil by other means,’ including by attempting to cross the border between ports of entry by trekking through deserts or swimming across the Rio Grande. Often, these efforts had tragic ends.
“One couple that grew discouraged after a month of waiting in a camp near the border decided to cross the river and ask for asylum once they reached U. S. soil, but they were caught in a swift current and drowned. Another woman also drowned, along with her 2-year-old son, after she gave up waiting in a tent camp and attempted to swim across the river. Hundreds of others have met a similar fate, and many more died crossing the desert along the southern border, all making 2020 and 2021 some of the ‘deadliest year[s] for migrant crossings’ in various regions of the southern border.”
I lived and worked in Germany in the 1980s, and you couldn’t be there in those years without feeling how the entire postwar refugee framework — in America and across postwar Europe — grew out of one unbearable lesson, that turning desperate people away at the door and sending them back to die is something decent nations swore they’d never do again.
In 1939, the United States turned away the St. Louis, a ship carrying 937 Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s Nazi Germany purge of all “non-Aryan” people. The ship returned to Europe where the Nazis seized its passengers, ultimately murdering 254 of them in the “detention centers” Germany ran in occupied countries.
Americans were horrified and humiliated as the story became known well after the war, and the Refugee Act of 1980 was our nation writing the promise that we’d never repeat such a horror into law; it passed with broad bipartisan support.
On Thursday of this week five unelected men and one unelected woman in robes decided that promise is now optional for a president who welcomes white South African “refugees” but wants to purge American of people whose skin is darker than his.
I’ve argued for years, including in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, that Republicans on this Court long ago seized powers the Framers never gave it, and have — since Nixon flipped the court to the right and appointed Lewis Powell (of Powell Memo infamy) in 1972 — spent the last fifty years using them on behalf of the morbidly rich and the party that serves them.
From Buckley in 1976 and Bellotti (written by Powell himself in 1978) through Citizens United in 2010, this generation’s Republican justices — each carefully placed on the Court by big money interests since the 1980s — rewrote our democracy and turned it into an auction; earlier this term they even gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act to help solidify raw GOP political power.
Now they’re telling Congress its laws are merely suggestions whenever a Republican president disagrees.
Justice Louis Brandeis warned us a century ago that, “[W]e can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.” The morbidly rich men who put these justices on the Court made their choice, and the justices are delivering for them, tearing another bite out of our democracy with every decision.
The good news is that the branch the Court just tried to sideline is the one closest to you. Ahilan Arulanantham, who argued the Syrian case, urged Congress to act to overrule the Court, and he’s right, because Congress can restore judicial review, can rewrite these statutes in language even Sam Alito can’t twist, can expand and rebalance the Court itself, and can be made to do all of it if enough of us demand it.
Call your senators and representative at 202-224-3121 and tell them a Court declaring Congress irrelevant is a five-alarm constitutional emergency: we need a judicial code of ethics for SCOTUS so they have the follow the same laws as all other federal judges must; impeachment hearings for Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Roberts; 18-year term limits; and a rapid expansion of the Court to at least 13 members to bring it into line with previous, historic ratios to other senior courts.
None of this changes unless ordinary people refuse to let it stand. So get loud, stay in it, and if this piece helped you understand what really happened yesterday, share it and send people to hartmannreport.com so more of us understand exactly what we’re up against, exactly who to hold responsible, and how.
Posted on June 27, 2026 by Ellen Brown (EllenBrown.com)
As Americans prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, few are paying attention to a bill moving through Congress that could seriously impinge on our financial independence.
The Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act, H.R. 4766, is slated to make privately issued stablecoins a major component of the U.S. monetary system. Supporters see stablecoins as a way to strengthen the dollar’s global role while creating a vast new market for U.S. Treasury securities. Critics see the rise of programmable private money that can be monitored, frozen, or restricted by its issuers. Banks fear the loss of the deposits that are essential to advancing affordable credit. What appears to be a debate about digital tokens has thus become a battle over the future of banking itself and finance.
Why Stablecoins Matter
Stablecoins are privately issued digital tokens that can circulate on blockchain networks independently of the banking system. They are designed to maintain a stable value, typically one dollar per token. Unlike Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, whose values fluctuate wildly, stablecoins are usually backed by reserve assets such as cash and short-term U.S. Treasury securities.
Their growth has been explosive. The stablecoin market now measures in the hundreds of billions of dollars and continues to expand rapidly. Advocates see them as the next stage in the evolution of money: faster, cheaper, available around the clock, and capable of moving across borders without relying on traditional banking networks.
For users in countries suffering from inflation, currency controls, or banking instability, dollar-denominated stablecoins can function as digital dollar savings accounts. Residents of Argentina, Turkey, Nigeria, and other countries may trust a Treasury-backed dollar token more than their own national currency. In some countries suffering from inflation, merchants quote prices in dollar stablecoins and accept them directly through mobile apps.
The Push from Cryptocurrency Advocates: Ending “Regulation by Enforcement”
The stated goal of the CLARITY Act is to establish a statutory framework that clarifies whether digital assets are securities, commodities, or payment stablecoins. Before this legislation, regulators—primarily the SEC—often applied decades-old laws to modern blockchain technology. Because the rules weren’t explicitly written for crypto, companies would discover they were in violation only when they were served with a lawsuit or a fine.
The most prominent example is SEC vs. Ripple Labs. Ripple launched its XRP token in 2012 and operated for nearly a decade without specific guidance that its token was considered a security. In 2020, the SEC sued Ripple, alleging they had been selling unregistered securities for years. Ripple was forced into years of litigation and hundreds of millions in legal fees to determine if a rule applied to them retroactively.
The CLARITY Act, alongside the GENIUS Act (which focuses on stablecoins), represents a shift from “Regulation by Enforcement” to “Regulation by Guidance,” where firms have a clear rulebook to follow before they launch products rather than waiting for a subpoena to understand their legal status.
The Government’s Interest
The push for passage of the Clarity Act has come not only from crypto advocates but from policymakers, because every stablecoin backed by Treasury securities creates another buyer for U.S. government debt. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has embraced stablecoins as a means of strengthening the dollar’s global role. The Treasury Department projects that the stablecoin market could eventually reach trillions of dollars. If that happens, stablecoin issuers could become some of the largest buyers of Treasury bills in the world, helping to replace losses from those central banks that have been “de-dollarizing” by selling their reserves of U.S. debt.
Another advantage of stablecoins from the government’s perspective is their ability to reassert U.S. monetary sovereignty over the eurodollar market — the massive, offshore market where dollars are created through bank lending without direct oversight from the Fed. This is a complicated subject for a later article, but the bottom line is that by shifting global demand from uncollateralized eurodollar bank promises to tokens backed 1 to 1 by U.S. Treasuries, stablecoins effectively force privately-issued offshore dollars back onto the U.S. government’s balance sheet.
Promise or Threat?
Those are some of the upsides, but stablecoins are not neutral payment tokens. Part 3 of this series discussed Project Hamilton, which showed what a public digital dollar could look like — fast, privacy-protected and democratic. The stablecoin system rising in its place looks very different. It is private, not public; programmable, not cash‑like; surveilled, not anonymous.
Every stablecoin transaction is permanently recorded on a public blockchain. Tokens can be frozen, seized, or destroyed. Users can be blocked. Circle (USDC) maintains a blacklist function and has frozen addresses at the request of law enforcement or at its own discretion. Tether (USDT) has frozen billions of dollars’ worth of tokens across thousands of addresses. PayPal’s PYUSD includes explicit “freeze” and “wipe” functions in its smart‑contract code.
This is the sort of “programmability” that CBDC critics fear – the ability to embed code into the money itself, causing it to execute transactions automatically when specific conditions are met. In fact, stablecoins could potentially be more invasive than a CBDC, since private issuers are not subject to the constitutional obligations imposed on the U.S. government by the 4th and 5th Amendments. In a June 23, 2026 podcast, Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, called stablecoins “much more terrifying than CBDCs because you have complete non-accountability.” Private stablecoins operate via private contracts and “terms of service” that often bypass traditional due process. They can embed algorithmic terms that are enforced automatically, without recourse to a court or even a human teller.
A Digital Gold Mine for Issuers
Under the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act), passed in July 2025, stablecoins must be backed 1 to 1 with dollar collateral. That collateral can take various forms, but stablecoin issuers typically maintain their reserves in highly liquid, short-term instruments—primarily 3-month U.S. Treasury Bills—to ensure they can satisfy redemptions quickly. As of June 18, 2026, the 3-month Treasury yield is 3.83% (down from 5%+ in 2024-25).
Stablecoin issuers make huge profits under this arrangement. The issuer sells stablecoins, uses the proceeds to buy Treasuries, and keeps the interest. Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, has achieved a market cap of $120 billion with a staff of only about 50 employees. It reported a record-breaking net profit of $6.2 billion for the full year of 2023, and quarterly profits reaching $4.52 billion in Q1 2024 alone. A significant portion of this income is derived from its massive holdings of U.S. Treasuries, estimated at over $100 billion.
Particularly controversial are the stablecoin and crypto businesses of the president’s own family, and the potential conflicts of interest involved.
Who Should Receive the Interest – Private Middlemen or the Public?
Cornell Law professor Robert Hockett proposes a different model. He suggests that TreasuryDirect accounts could function as digital wallets, allowing individuals to hold Treasury-backed digital dollars directly and receive the Treasury yield themselves rather than through private intermediaries.
This is also the major concern of the banking establishment with the pending Clarity Act. A provision allowing stablecoin issuers to pay their customers “rewards,” considered the equivalent of yield or interest, could suck away their deposit base. Issuers collecting nearly 4% interest on their Treasuries could pay rewards of 2% or 3% to investors and easily outcompete banks paying 0.1 or 0.2 percent on deposits. Banking‑industry estimates of potential deposit flight into stablecoin platforms range from $65 billion to over $1 trillion, with some analysts warning that in a fully developed stablecoin system, as much as $6 trillion could migrate out of the banking system.
But wait: if banks can create deposits on their books just by making loans, as the Bank of England has confirmed, why are deposits so important to them?
This is another complicated subject for a follow-up article, but the bottom line is that while a bank can create deposits, it cannot create the “reserves” necessary to transfer the loaned funds out of the bank. Deposits created when a bank makes a loan are a liability of the bank – its promise to pay on demand. What it pays with are reserves, which only the central bank can issue – either as vault cash (coins and dollar bills) or as digital reserves held in a “master account” at the Fed. The reserves are the payment rails for transferring deposits, and the cheapest way for banks to get them is through deposits transferred from other banks.
Deposits are thus considered the lifeblood of banks, and we need banks for our credit requirements. Stablecoin issuers don’t create new dollars or extend credit. They just tokenize existing dollars drawn from chartered banks, invest them in government securities, and keep the interest. Banks are the only institutions that create credit for the real economy.
If deposits leave the banking system, lending capacity shrinks; and the most vulnerable institutions are the community banks that extend credit to local businesses. Megabanks have other ways to acquire cheap reserves, including the repo market and the Fed discount window. Community banks rely heavily on incoming deposits to provide the reserves to move their loans, and they cannot compete with stablecoins in attracting deposits because they have substantially higher costs than issuers working with algorithms in the cloud.
Why We Need the Community Banks That Stablecoins Could Undermine
Richard Werner, Prof. of Economics at the University of Winchester in the UK, argues that community banks are particularly important for economic growth. Large banks prefer large deals with large customers. A banker can spend time arranging a billion dollar transaction for a hedge fund or private equity firm, or spend the same time processing dozens of small loans to local businesses. Small and medium-sized businesses today account for the majority of jobs; and without community banks, they often struggle to get the financing to adopt new technologies and expand production.
Werner points to the German model, where small businesses typically work with local community banks, cooperative banks, and savings banks that lend only within their local areas. Because the bank and its customers share the same economic fortunes, the banks have an incentive to support local productive enterprises. When a business identifies a promising investment opportunity, it can present its plan to a local bank that already knows the company and understands the local economy. Funding decisions can sometimes be made within days, allowing firms to adopt new technologies quickly and remain globally competitive.
The result, he says, is visible in Germany’s remarkable number of “hidden champions”—small and medium-sized firms that nevertheless rank among the top companies in the world within their specialized market niches. Germany’s success, Werner argues, is closely tied to the fact that roughly 80 percent of German banks are small local institutions that lend locally.
Werner extends the same argument to China. After coming to power in 1978, Deng Xiaoping sought to improve economic performance by decentralizing credit allocation. Rather than relying on a handful of central planners to determine where financing should go, China created thousands of local banks, village banks, cooperative banks, and regional institutions. The result was a vast network of local loan officers making lending decisions based on local knowledge. Werner contrasts “five central bankers” making decisions with “five million loan officers” evaluating opportunities throughout the country. He argues that this decentralized approach played a crucial role in China’s sustained high growth and poverty reduction over the following four decades.
The same has been true in the United States, which had a record 30,456 banks in 1921. Today, however, that number has shrunk to only 9,082 insured financial institutions (banks and credit unions). Small banks have had to merge with much larger banks to stay solvent, largely due to higher regulatory costs and the competitive pressure of the megabanks.
Werner observes that bank size also affects where credit is directed. A banking sector dominated by a few large institutions tends to channel credit toward financial speculation and large corporate borrowers. A banking system composed of many small local banks tends to channel newly created money toward productive local enterprises. When credit goes into new technologies, equipment, and productive capacity, the result is to increase output, employment, and sustainable economic growth without triggering inflation.
Werner concludes that if governments want stronger productivity growth, more small-business formation, greater regional prosperity, and less inequality, they need to encourage the creation of local community banks and adopt a lighter regulatory regime for smaller institutions.
Productivity and the Burgeoning Federal Debt
Economic growth is also particularly important for dealing with the federal debt. Stablecoins may help finance the debt, but they do not shrink it. They just fill some of the gap left by the People’s Bank of China and other central banks that have been selling U.S. Treasuries. The unsustainable $1.2 trillion interest tab must still be paid and continues on its exponential upward growth trajectory.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued that the U.S. can “grow our way out of the debt” by increasing production and expanding the economy faster than the debt grows. President Trump has similarly argued that economic growth can reduce the relative burden of the national debt, much as occurred after World War II.
The federal debt exceeded 100% of GDP at the end of the war. But the debt burden gradually declined as the economy expanded faster than the debt, shrinking the debt-to-GDP ratio. And for that sort of growth in today’s economy, preserving the viability of community banks is essential.
Currency Backed by Debt or Productivity?
As artificial intelligence and automation replace jobs while dramatically increasing productive capacity, however, policymakers may one day question whether money must be issued against debt at all – or whether some portion of it could be issued directly against the productive capacity of the economy itself.
That is not a new idea. In fact it represents a return to our revolutionary roots. It was how the American colonists broke free of the “British system” that exploited the colonies for the production of commodities. Rather than relying on foreign currencies, the American colonial governments paid for goods and services with paper scrip they issued themselves. When the king banned that practice, the colonists rebelled – and they won.
Abraham Lincoln used the same funding mechanism to avoid usurious interest rates from British-backed banks that would have re-colonized the States by debt. He paid for the Civil War effort and major national infrastructure with government-issued Greenbacks (U.S. Notes).
When these government notes exceeded the production of goods and services, the supply and demand curve was skewed toward price inflation. But in a world of AI abundance, the curve will tilt the other way – toward too little money chasing too many goods and services. In an economy of that sort of unprecedented productivity, the government will need to issue new money just to balance the scales. And this money will need to be paid to the consumers who will buy the products, not only to close the wealth gap but to provide the demand to absorb the hyper-abundant supply.
Thus this series comes full circle, to the need for a “universal high income” or “sovereign wealth dividend” to solve an AI-induced unemployment crisis – and for a government-issued digital currency to fund it, built on the cash-like, privacy-protected model of Project Hamilton and the ECASH Act.
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