A couple of weeks back, I wrote a post about some of the work that USAID did.  Now I’d like to drill down a bit and talk about some of the work that I personally did for USAID.

This runs a bit long, because this sort of thing is all about context.  But if you’re curious about what some of these people who just got fired from USAID actually did all day long?  Here’s one story.

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The Guardian reports on marches and protests across the globe to celebrate International Women’s Day. Three cheers for all feminists who took to the streets today to remind us that women’s rights should never be taken for granted; in fact, as The Guardian discusses, women’s rights are under severe pressure. And given the rise of fascism and other forms of authoritarianism everywhere, we have ample reasons to worry that they will be rolled back even further. After all, it is no coincidence that one of the first victims of Victor Orban’s rise to power in Hungary was gender studies; and that one of the first things Donald Trump did was to abolish all DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) policies. His vicious attacks on nonbinary and transpeople should be understood in the same light, because what nonbinary and transpeople do by claiming their identities, is to reject the traditional strict binary gender ideologies that anti-feminism requires, with clearly described roles for men and women. We are not only living in times of democratic decline; we are living in times of anti-feminist setbacks – and in those times, protests are vital to bring oxygen to organized resistance (feminist and otherwise). To all those who went on the streets today – thank you!

I’ve not been out taking pictures, so here’s another cormorant from the sequence I shot a few days ago.

Two months ago, I saw No Other Land in a large movie theatre in Brussels. No Other Land is a documentary made by a team of two Palestinians and two Israeli.

We follow their reporting on the years-long destruction of Masafer Yatta, a village on the Palestinian Westbank, by Israeli forces. The Israeli State, backed up by its army, orders the villagers to leave the land because the land will be used by the army for training; but the villagers have lived there for generations and are the owners of the land. As one woman says, “there is no other land” they could go to.

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As I type this, Trump is threatening tariffs on anyone who challenges the interests of America’s technology oligarchs, all of whom are now paying obeisance at this court. Technology is the US biggest weapon against the free world of which it was formerly part, and the right place to fight back. But what can be done?
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40 years ago today the Daily Mail carried a front page picture of police officers carrying me away from a Miners Strike rally in Whitehall. I mightn’t have known, but a friend of my sister’s told her, having recognized me, with glee, when her dad picked the paper up at the breakfast table. (I never found out what her Daily Mail-reading parents thought when their daughter squealed “That’s Harry”). There was another picture, more recognizable still, inside.

February 24th had been the final national demonstration of support for the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike. We all knew that, after almost a full year, the strike was about to end in a humiliating defeat. And so, more to the point, did the police officers, who had been given remarkable license to engage in thuggery in the mining communities, and had been very well paid for it. Our view at the time was that they knew that the fun would end, by and large, when the strike did, so the Feb 24th rally was a sort of last hurrah for them. The incident that had led to my arrest felt sinister at the time, but of course was unremarkable. Police officers had guided a (very) small section of the (huge) demonstration into a sort of alcove on Whitehall, and just gone for us, knocking people to the ground, pulling them around, kicking them, arresting whomever they felt like arresting (I was knocked down with a very impressive and deliberate body slam, hitting my head on the pavement with, presumably, no serious damage). The arrestees shared the van with the arresting officers. We were on the floor, and subject to regular kickings, while the police officers decided what to accuse each of us with, and who would be witness for whom (you needed two police witnesses for a conviction).[1] Indicating me, my arresting officer (a Londoner called Neil, with a Scottish last name I won’t mention for discretion’s sake) said “He was about to throw a glass bottle full of liquid with a lit rag in it. Who else saw that?”, and another officer volunteered to have ‘seen’ it.

Being processed in Bow Street Police Station was fine – no more physical violence – but being shut in a small, Victorian, cell, which was overheated, and having had no food or water for many hours, was actually quite unnerving. Still more unnerving was when another arrestee joined me, who might have been an actual violent criminal! (In fact, he was). I was released around 3 am, so couldn’t get public transport home, but knocked up my friend Adrian in Theobalds Road. I attended my philosophy of language tutorial with Mark Sainsbury as usual the next morning at 10 am.

At the trial, many months later, the two police officers told inconsistent lies which my solicitor frankly wasn’t smart enough to exploit. The three magistrates, though, knew perfectly well I hadn’t done what I was accused of, but convicted anyway (Adrian paid the fine on the spot, and my Great Uncle Dewi sent me a cheque for the amount, along with a card signed by the whole family telling me how proud they were of me). (For more, see the link about Adrian).

My dad knew a few senior Met officers from his time at ILEA, one of whom had recently observed to him after a phone conversation that his, my dad’s, home telephone was being tapped, (At ILEA he had liaised with the police around many issues, including the time that the National Front (overt Nazis) sued him for not allowing them to use school buildings for their meetings). Without my knowledge he complained to the Met, resulting in a visit to my lodgings by an internal investigation officer (I didn’t have a phone, so he just turned up out of the blue, without an appointment. Those were the days!). The officer was delightful and either believed me that I’d been mistreated or was a brilliant actor. Either way, he drew me to the sensible conclusion that nothing was to be done about it.

Last September I took an Uber from my home to the Madison airport.

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So – Germany has elected, and the results look grim: a huge shift the right, with large wins for a party, the AfD, parts of which have officially been declared anti-constitutional (but a ban does not seem on the horizon). I spent the first few hours after the polls had closed with a group of volunteer election helpers counting votes. I had registered my availability a few weeks earlier, and had gotten a letter that summoned me to appear at 7.30 on election morning in a middle school in a rather diverse neighborhood of the city in West Germany where I spend part of my life. I cycled through the empty city at dawn, we received instructions, and then we had to agree on shifts and it turned out that I wasn’t needed until 1pm. I cycled home and showed up again later. 

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Quick quiz. Suppose you read a headline in the online version of the Wall Street Journal (or NY Times etc) stating that, from now on, US Treasury bonds would be redeemed in crypto. Would your response be

(i) That’s absurd. Either it’s April Fools Day or someone has hacked the website

(ii) That’s unlikely. Surely [1] Wall Street will be able to kill this crazy idea

(iii) That will be tricky. Which cryptocurrencies will be included and what will be the exchange rates?

If your answer was (i) you can stop reading here (and don’t bother commenting to justify your position). This answer assumes that, despite Trump’s bluster, nothing has fundamentally changed. You’re still in the denial stage, with six more to come..

If you’re answer is (ii) or (iii) you are paying at least some attention. I’ll point to some evidence suggesting (iii) is a plausible answer, and look at what that implies for the global financial system.

Looking specifically at debt, the idea of defaulting on US government debt, or threatening to, has long appealed to Republicans. Here’s a piece I wrote back in 2013 [2] Unsurprisingly, Trump has embraced the idea, suggesting not only that a default might not be too bad, but also that some (unspecified) debts might be fraudulent.

But there are lots of other possibilities. One, raised by Paul Krugman is that the US Federal Reserve might be coerced into understating the inflation rate, thereby reducing the return on Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities.

Another, already taking place, is that the government may be able to coerce private banks into reversing legal payments. Henry Farrell (of CT) and Felix Salmon discuss this here.

The longer-term implication is that the existing global financial system, built around the US dollar can no longer be regarded as a reliable basis for organising trade, investment and banking. Some alternative will have to be constructed at an international rather than global levle. Moreover, this will have to be done on the fly, as the existing system crumbles around us.

This will doubtless be seen as good news for the BRICS countries, which have long chafed under the dominance of the dollar. But the obvious alternative, the Chinese Renminbi (aka yuan) is no better. As well as not being fully convertible, it is subject ot the political control of the CCP dictatorship.

An important point to start with is that the rapid growth in international financial integration that characterised the era of neoliberal globalisation came to an end with the Global Financial Crisis. As in this case, at least part of the adjustment to the end of the US will occur autonomously, as investors either steer clear of US financial markets or decide to play the increasingly corrupt games that will be required to survive there.

In this context, it’s crucial to understand the “weaponisation” of the global financial system, most notably by the US, as discussed by Henry Farrell and Abe Newman. The most striking instance of this so far has beem the seizure of Russian financial assets after the 2022 (further) invasion of Ukraine. Most of these assets were held by EU financial institutions, which Putin imagined to be safe from the US.

Until now, the main complaint of critics about weaponisation of the financial system was that it was being overused in the pursuit of secondary objectives. But with Trump in power, it will be used to do direct harm. Reliance on the US dollar is giving hostages to his regime.

Deconstructing and replacing a global system based on the assumption that the US is a reliable guarantor of stability will be a huge task, but the alternative of a system run by Trump and Musk is even worse.

We need to recognise that the idea of a single global financial system, which has been dominant since the 1980s, is done for. It’s not a loss to be mourned, but that won’t make the task of replacing it any easier.

I’m thinking about an alternative system, centred on the Eurozone, but incorporating other countries that don’t want to be dominated by either the US or China. That’s a mammoth problem

I’ll put up two ideas to start with.

The first is the need for unremitting hostility towards crypto. Should proposals for recognition of crypto as a reserve asset for the US turn into reality. the result will be to make the $US itself useless as a reserve currency. Governments and financial institutions outside the US should be ready to dump dollars if this looks like becoming a reality. In the meantime, financial institutions should be prohibited from dealing with it in any way, and individuals should be required to report crypto holdings and transactions.

My other suggestion is to take seriously a mildly snarky reference, in comments to my Crooked Timber post, to a “Brisbane Woods” conference. (I live near Brisbane, Australia, and the allusion is to the 1944 Bretton Woods conference which established, among other things, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.) These were set up in Washington both because the US was by far the largest contributor and because they could be colocated with the US Treasury. The famous “Washington consensus” of the 1990s referred to the neoliberal policy views shared by these three institutions.

But US contributions have been dropping steadily in both real and nominal terms and will doubtless be cut further by Trump. And proximity to the Musk-controlled US Treasury is now a danger not an asset.

The World Bank needs to move out of the US and drop the convention by which the president is always a US citizen (along with the parallel convention where the IMF managing director is European). Rather than moving to a single new location, both the Bank and the IMF need a more decentralised setup, ideally with significant centres in every continent[3]. This would involve both competition and co-operation with the BRICS group, which shares the aim of breaking with $US hegemony, but is not so keen on legal and democratic governance.

Those items are challenging enough, and just scratch the surface of what needs to be done. But repeating myself from previous posts, the idea of the US as the indispensable centre of a stable and democratic global order is gone for good. The sooner we realise that, the better.

fn1. Quiggin’s Rule of Surely: It’s a Sure Sign that you are not Sure

fn2. I didn’t pick the headline which was overblown even at the time. Now, if we wake up in four years time with Trump gone and nothing worse than a US default to worry about, it will have been the pleasantest of dreams

fn3. Except Antarctica and maybe Oceania, though of course Brisbane would be a great choice.

“America is rock and roll.” — Alfred Howard

Did some of you find it hard to feel the love for President’s Day this year? Well, remember: the reason it exists is because we Americans, as a nation, couldn’t choose between Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday.

Washington is pretty great, but I’m a Lincoln guy myself. You probably know this photo:




As various people have pointed out, this particular picture was photoshopped.  A real ’62 Strat would have a maple fretboard and a single ply pick board.  Also, it’s absolutely not true that Keith Richards gave Lincoln this guitar– Richards was always a Telecaster guy, and anyway he was just a little kid back then.

That said, it’s worth taking a moment to contemplate Lincoln’s musical career.

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The UK has recently introduced (via “guidance” rather than legislation) a permanent ban on naturalisation for people who arrive in the UK via “dangerous journeys”. The power used to block their applications is the Home Secretary’s discretion to refuse citizenship to someone of “bad character”. This new policy seemingly conflicts with the UK’s commitments under the Refugee Convention. I’ve a short piece on this at the London Review of Books blog.

“They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.” — a White House official.

I’ve been a USAID contractor for most of the last 20 years. Not a federal employee; a contractor. USAID does most of its work through contractors. I’ve been a field guy, working in different locations around the world.

If you’ve been following the news at all, you probably know that Trump and Musk have decided to destroy USAID.  There’s been a firehose of disinformation and lies.  It’s pretty depressing.  

So here are a couple of true USAID stories — one political, one personal.

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Today’s post focuses on the contribution of elite higher education to the rise of Trump. This may seem in bad taste because it is also clearly targeted by MAGA, and so our impulse is to circle the wagons. But if you wish to develop a defensive posture you must understand the territory.

Here I presuppose three ideas: first, that wherever the Trump II presidency ends up, America’s constitutional and political regime will be quite different from (to simplify) the (cold war) post-Warren court era of the last half century and a bit.* Second the re-election of Trump exhibits a willingness to embrace the corruption in the Machiavellian sense that he represents. Importantly, corruption in this sense is not just about illegal and legal bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined. The two are, of course, connected.

In particular, ever since I first started blogging on Trump’s ascendancy (back in 2015), I have been treating the electoral preference for Trump as a sign of mistrust between the electorate and the then political elites (which was first expressed in the Obama elections) and, more subtly, a preference for a crook who people believe will be our sonofabitch. America-First is a doctrine of zero-sum relations. And so, in particular, who gets what is related to who you know and how you navigate an opaque system (recall my post on the Madoff scandal).

By elite higher education, I mean roughly the highly selective universities and colleges (starting with the so-called “Overlap meetings”), and the schools that emulate them, that were the target of antitrust action and class-action lawsuit(s) for colluding on financial aid and price-fixing since the 1990s (see also 568 group). To be sure, some of the collusion had the noble aim to prevent scarce resources intended for poor and disadvantaged students flowing up to wealthy applicants.

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I received the email about Sandy on early on Saturday morning in the middle of a five hour visit to the Emergency Room, at a point at which it was not clear everything was going to be ok (don’t worry, it was). Still, and although his friends have all been preparing themselves for this, it was devastating. I didn’t think I’d talk about it here. But, although The NYT obit is very straightforward and accurate, it misses something that everyone who knew him will wish it had mentioned.

Sandy was already an intellectual hero of mine when I met him at a Spencer Foundation Board retreat in 2007. It’s not just that he wrote the best philosophy paper about equality in education, which as a sociologist he had no right to do, but because I had started reading his work when I committed myself to doing empirically informed political philosophy, and realised immediately that he was a sort of mirror of what I wanted to be: a normatively committed and informed social scientist who would never allow his values to guide him to empirically convenient results. We had a two hour break on the first afternoon and Sandy, who had never seen (or, I am sure, heard of) me in his life casually asked if I was busy, and would I like to take a walk with him. I managed to overcome my awe, and, well, Sandy was totally brilliant, and its not that he didn’t know that, but he seemed to be able to find whatever was most interesting in whatever you said to him so that the gap between you was irrelevant to the matter at hand. He didn’t seem to care what you status was — he talked as enthusiastically and openly with college presidents, other scholars, students, staff people, receptionists, interns. He could, and did, put anyone at their ease. I quickly saw that he was either determined not to observe, or, quite possibly, completely oblivious to, the iniquitous status hierarchies in academia: his democratic outlook was entirely authentic to him. (Now, reading what that sentence, I realise it’s exactly what I might just as well have written about my dad).

I’m an intellectual outlier in the worlds I inhabited with Sandy. Usually if we were at a workshop, conference, or meeting together (and we often were) I was the only philosopher in a room full of social scientists. But over the years I gradually observed the vast informal network of scholars who were specifically indebted to Sandy for his seemingly-effortless but vast kindness and support. You meet people and gradually realise they are connected to Sandy and when you reveal that you know him too their faces light up and they tell you some story about him that is always delightful and different. The NYT obit doesn’t really capture this. To match his intellectual brilliance and reach is unachievable for most of us. But to leave this world so aptly loved by so many is something we could all aspire to.