The Producers at the Muny in 2008. Photo by Meetmeatthemuny. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Here we go again. It’s time for another performance of American politicians’ favorite off-Broadway play, “Shutdown Panic.”

“Congress only has a few weeks to avoid a government shutdown,” Mitchell Hill reports at WTOP, “but leaders of both parties are still a long way from agreeing on a stopgap spending bill to keep federal workers on the job.”

The cast changes but slowly. The plot gets tweaked but little.

Act One: “There’s a government shutdown coming if we don’t pass a spending bill!”

Act Two: “Let’s fight about it!”

(The most common plot tweak comes in here with the occasional insertion of a short supposed “shutdown”)

Act Three: “SURPRISE! We made a deal!”

Act Three always closes with a set change: A road, and cast members kicking a can down it.

Curtain call — the cast takes its bows. They’ve once again saved the day by borrowing and spending more money than ever before. Please clap.

At this point, I pause to check two numbers. The “National Debt Clock” tells me that the play’s producers owe nearly $37.5 trillion to their backers and that 2025’s expenses stand at nearly $2 trillion more than box office receipts.

It’s Max Bialystock’s and Leo Bloom’s wildest dream: “Springtime for Hitler” isn’t just a money-making (for them, but nobody else) flop, it’s history’s longest-running such flop!

The last time US politicians actually (and very temporarily) paid off their ever-growing debt was 190 years ago in 1835. The last time they even managed to theoretically balance one year’s budget was 24 years ago in 2001.

And, let me emphasize: It’s THEIR debt, not YOUR debt.

The organization they run (“the US government”), not you, borrowed the money.

They love to talk about a “national” debt and shake their heads in amazement at how much each American “owes” (about $110,000), but your signature isn’t on any of those loan documents. In fact, if you hold the US government’s bonds, you’re actually among their unlucky creditors.

Let’s throw in two more numbers: 123.8% and 70.

The former is the ratio of the politicians’ debt to the country’s Gross Domestic Product; the latter is the IQ cut-off point separating those who believe the debt will ever be paid off from those who know it won’t.

In May, Moody’s lowered the US government’s “sovereign credit rating” from Aaa (“highest rating, representing minimum credit risk”) to Aa1 (“high-grade”).  In reality, that rating should be Ca (“highly speculative, or near default”) or C (“little prospect for recovery of principal or interest”).

At some point, the producers of a commercially unsuccessful play default and the play’s run comes to an end.

That’s going to happen with the US government. And the longer it takes to happen the uglier things will get.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“When [David] Graeber died, five years ago today, he was just about the most important public intellectual in the world” asserts Thomas Peermohamed Lambert (“David Graeber: the Left’s lost hero,” UnHerd, September 2).  An unlikely position for the author of tomes covering “some of the most mind-numbing subjects,” from the originations of finance to managerial administration, whose defiant anti-authoritarianism apparently mapped “a kind of ‘road not taken’ for the political Left” which has since veered ever more sharply into pinning all their hopes and fears on the next election.

Yet Lambert can count Graeber’s bestsellers “among the few genuinely popular Left-wing texts of our time,” offering “the same, visceral appeal as today’s Right-wing populists” — who have taken up such themes as emphasizing “‘values’ as distinct from ‘value'” (no longer the domain of such leftists as The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy author Raj Patel),  “paeans to untrammeled human creativity” Graeber made in the face of the sort of tech billionaire via which such techno-utopianism is now judged guilty by association, and exploring “the horrors of modern bureaucracy” while “the ‘b’ word is hardly ever uttered by progressives” (at least those who, unlike Argentine comic-strip character Mafalda, don’t need to holler the name of an eponymous pet turtle) more comfortable with “the language of enlightened paternalism.”

Even being “deeply anti-capitalist, and convinced that the society he lived in needed massive social transformation,” which Lambert points to as the dividing line between Graeber and the right, could easily sound closer to the “Birkenstocked Burkeans” of National Review‘s Rod Dreher than a Biden-era brat summer. The Economist, the newspaper in which Lambert locates the “orthodox line of rebuttal” to Graeber that seemingly wasteful jobs “ultimately benefit humanity by increasing production,” had once employed the laissez-faire liberal Herbert Spencer who had argued that in self-managed worker cooperatives where “each obtains exactly the remuneration due for his work, minus only the cost of administration, the productive power of the concern is greatly increased.”

Graeber would at least not quarrel with Lambert that avowed anarchism was “far rarer in academic life” than Marxism.”  In 2004, Graeber himself had asserted (with coauthor Andrej Grubacic) that “there are still thousands of academic Marxists, but almost no academic anarchists,” with the professoriate preferring “the only great social movement that was invented by a Ph.D.” Even then, the ranks of respected academic anarchist anthropologists included Harold Barclay and James C. Scott together with Graeber. And for decades before and since 2004, one of the all-time most cited living academics has been anti-Marxist anarchist Noam Chomsky.

Auburn’s academic anarchist Roderick Long summed up: “Graeber’s liberatory vision” has much of value as “a useful corrective for those” — including Graeber himself, who had previously dismissed “terms like free enterprise” as cover for “the sordid economic reality, one where productive wealth was controlled by the few for their own benefit” — “who are too quick to take the case for free enterprise as a validation of the perversities of the existing … market.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Disinterring Graeber: The First Five Years” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, September 8, 2025
2. “Disinterring Graeber: The First Five Years” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], September 8, 2025

On September 2, the US government claimed that military operators acting on its behalf murdered 11 foreign nationals aboard a boat in international waters off the coast of Venezuela.

I say “claimed” because Venezuelan communications minister Freddy Ñáñez suggests that a video of the murders released by the US government is an AI-generated “deepfake.” Regimes lie, and it’s not obvious which regime is lying in this particular instance.

But let’s assume that US regime officials, including US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth and US secretary of state Marco Rubio, were truthful in their claims.

If so, it’s reasonable to also assume they’re truthful when they claim that these 11 murders are just the start of a “campaign,” and that the US government intends to “blow up and get rid of” (per Rubio) even more victims.

When someone credibly confesses to murder, announces an intent to commit further murders, and clearly possesses the means to do so, it seems to me that whatever law applies should be brought to bear.

Under 18 U.S. Code § 1111, “Within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, Whoever is guilty of murder in the first degree shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for life; Whoever is guilty of murder in the second degree, shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life.”

Said jurisdiction is defined in 18 U.S. Code § 7. It includes any vessel or aircraft belonging in whole or in part to the United States, meaning that the military personnel involved in the murder mission are themselves criminals … IF the law is applied.

Similarly, the entire chain of command, all the way up to US president Donald Trump (who has publicly admitted to approving the crime) are clearly on the hook for “conspiracy to murder” under 18 U.S. Code § 1117 … IF the law is applied.

Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court ruled last year that presidents enjoy immunity for all “official acts,” even illegal ones like, say, ordering 11 murders. So Trump himself is as unlikely to be held accountable for this atrocity as for other crimes he’s ordered, such as the murder of eight-year-old American girl Nawar Anwar al-Awlaki in 2017.

But what about Hegseth, Rubio, and the various military officers who must have been involved in planning and directing the operation?

Holding them legally culpable may be as unlikely as bringing Trump himself to justice, but it’s theoretically possible. So far as I can tell there’s nothing to prevent a grand jury from indicting some or all of them.

The biggest hurdle to get over is that the US Department of Justice answers to Trump and likely won’t ASK a grand jury to do any such thing.

So, once again, the US government will get away with murdering anyone it announces is a “terrorist,” “drug smuggler,” etc., without having to prove the charges.

The only unique aspect of this particular mass murder is that its sole purpose seems to have been to distract us from the matter of Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Did it work?

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY