# Earl O'Garro
> Earl O'Garro on finance, economics, and politics — plain-spoken commentary on the numbers behind the headlines and the choices that shape them.
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).
## Pages
### About
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/about/
Last updated: 2026-07-17T02:31:46.000Z
![Earl O'Garro](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e16d0c_d630251fa123411888b0384a08e15727~mv2.jpeg)

Earl O'Garro writes on finance, economics, and politics — plain-spoken commentary on the numbers behind the headlines and the choices that shape them.

## Education

- BA, Wesleyan University
- MBA, Syracuse University

## Professional

- Chief Executive Officer — Free Hill Capital

## Boards & Civic Service

- The Connecticut Forum — Past Board Member
- Boys & Girls Club — Past Board Member
- Saint Francis Hospital — Corporator

## Connect

- [Twitter / X](https://twitter.com/earlogarro?ref=earlogarro.com)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/earl-o%E2%80%99garro-8a807935a/?ref=earlogarro.com)

## Press

Cardinal Media Services — Andre Charles  
[andre@cardinalmediaservices.com](mailto:andre@cardinalmediaservices.com)
### Media
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/media/
Last updated: 2026-07-16T21:24:03.000Z
Video commentary and audio on markets, currency, and geopolitics — collected in one place.
### Press
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/press/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T02:12:42.000Z
News, announcements, and press coverage of Earl O’Garro and Free Hill Capital.

## In the News

- [The National Law Review](https://natlawreview.com/press-releases/free-hill-capital-launches-free-hill-advisory-its-strategic-consulting?ref=earlogarro.com) — “Free Hill Capital Launches Free Hill Advisory, Its Strategic Consulting Division.”
- [The Columbus Dispatch](https://www.dispatch.com/press-release/story/210576/free-hill-capital-launches-free-hill-advisory-its-strategic-consulting-division/?ref=earlogarro.com) — “Free Hill Capital Launches Free Hill Advisory, Its Strategic Consulting Division.”

## Announcements

- [Free Hill Capital acquires Clymb IQ](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/earl-o-garro-8a807935a%5Fhappy-to-announce-our-acquisition-of-clymb-activity-7355250076270665728-cMrs?ref=earlogarro.com) — announced by Earl O’Garro.
- [Free Hill Capital newsroom](https://www.einpresswire.com/sources/u688149?ref=earlogarro.com) — the full archive of press releases.

## Elsewhere

- [Free Hill Capital](https://www.freehillcapital.com/?ref=earlogarro.com) — the firm founded and led by Earl O’Garro.
- [Earl O’Garro on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/earl-o%E2%80%99garro-8a807935a?ref=earlogarro.com)
- [Free Hill Capital on X](https://x.com/Freehillcapital?ref=earlogarro.com)

Media inquiries: Cardinal Media Services — Andre Charles, [andre@cardinalmediaservices.com](mailto:andre@cardinalmediaservices.com).
## Posts
### A Letter to Christine and Elmore Wonsley
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/a-letter-to-christine-and-elmore-wonsley/
Last updated: 2026-10-04T20:33:00.000Z
*By Earl O'Garro*

Dear Christine, dear Elmore,

I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times, and I want you to know that first, because I do not want you to believe that the words I am about to hand you arrived quickly or arrived without the specific labor of a man who has been trying, in the private corners of his mornings, to put them in a shape he could sign his own name to. They did not arrive quickly. They did not arrive easily. I have been working at them since the September afternoon the grand jury in Jackson County, Mississippi, declined to bring indictments in your son's death, and the question I have been asking in those mornings is whether I had any right to write to you at all. I am going to decide, this October morning, that I do, and I am going to decide it on the specific ground that I am a father of Black sons too, and that if I do not use the small share of a public voice I have been given in this country to say what I am about to say to you, I will have no honest answer for my own sons when they are old enough to read it.

I want to tell you where I am writing from, because the where is part of the letter. I started this letter last night, at the kitchen table in Connecticut where I write most of what you read from me. I am finishing it this morning, on my phone, from the waiting room of an urgent care clinic in the same town where my family lives and where my younger son plays football, where I brought him at first light for a workup on the injuries that have been accumulating in his body over the weeks past. He plays running back. He is the sort of boy a town like ours is proud of and a father like me cannot look at for too long without remembering what the country has, over the years, chosen to do with young men who look like him on fields that look like the one he will go back to on Friday night. He is going to be fine, I am told. The thing I will not stop thinking, as the hour of my sitting here extends, is that you were told something similar once, on a July afternoon, about a boy who had gone out on a boat.

I wrote about Nolan in the second week of July, from a borrowed apartment in Tokyo where I had gone on business the morning after the country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday, and I made you a promise in that piece without naming it as a promise. The promise was that I would keep writing. I am writing again now because the country has done, in the roughly ninety days since, what I predicted the country would do, which is to arrange for your son's death to become, in the plain reading of the official record, a death the country does not have to account for. The grand jury that convened in Pascagoula under Judge Fountain and heard, by the state's own accounting, forty-three witnesses and considered the output of one hundred and thirty-two subpoenas, returned a no-bill on the twenty-second of September. The state's chief medical examiner and the pathologist your family retained, Dr. Roger Mitchell, both ruled the cause and manner of Nolan's death undetermined. Both pathologists noted, and the grand jury acknowledged, the bruising on the back of Nolan's head. Both pathologists declined to classify that bruising as a fatal injury. The grand jury then wrote, in the plainest sentence it had the courage to write, that the condition and position and location of your son's body were, and I am quoting the record, consistent with drowning, which they called a diagnosis of exclusion. That is the language of a state apparatus that would like to be done with the matter. I want you to know that I read that language, when it was published, with the same mixture of grief and anger I expect you read it with, and that the plainest English I can offer you in response is that a diagnosis of exclusion is not a finding. It is a decision not to find.

I want to tell you what I think of the handling, and I want to tell you plainly, because I think a letter from a father to a father owes the father receiving it the plainness that was withheld from him by the men paid to render the verdict.

The handling of your son's death is, on the specific record, what the handling of a young Black man's unexplained death has looked like in the American South for the better part of a century. The investigation was long enough to appear thorough. The grand jury was large enough to appear deliberative. The paper that was produced was detailed enough to appear considered. The language that was chosen was cautious enough to appear fair. And the result, when all of that performance was finished, was a result that required the country to look at nothing, correct nothing, and prosecute no one. The bruising on the back of your son's head was named and then declared not fatal. The absence of a drowning finding was named and then absorbed into a presumption of drowning by exclusion. The gap between what Nolan's friends did or did not do on that boat and what the record would say about what they did or did not do was closed by a document that chose, carefully, not to require anyone to answer for the gap. That is a result the country knows how to produce. The county knew how to produce it. The county has produced it before, for other families, with the same procedural grammar, and the county will produce it again if we do not force a different grammar on the counties that are tempted to use the old one.

I am not writing to you with a theory about what happened on that boat. I do not have one and I would not advance one if I did, because the one obligation a man of my trade still owes the record is that he does not fill, with his own guess, the specific space the state left open by its deliberate decisions. I am writing to you about the deliberate decisions. The deliberate decisions are not a mystery. The decision to use a diagnosis of exclusion in a case where the direct evidence is incomplete is a decision. The decision to call bruising on the back of a young man's head non-fatal without naming its cause is a decision. The decision to send home a grand jury with the paper you now hold in your hands, instead of a paper that would have obligated the state to continue looking, is a decision. The decisions have authors. The authors have names. I am not going to recite the names on this page, because this is a letter to parents and not a piece of advocacy, but I want you to know that I have those names, and that I will keep them, and that I will use them in the writing I do over the months to come, and that if other parents in other counties in other summers are to be spared the specific procedural absorption your family was subjected to this September, those names are going to have to be said, out loud, in the ordinary rooms where the country decides who it still considers its children.

I want to say a word about Nolan now, because I do not want this letter to be a letter about the handling only. Nolan was eighteen years old. He was six foot one and a hundred and eighty-five pounds. He was a wide receiver who had signed on to play at Southwest Mississippi Community College, which means he was, this September, at the age the country has decided it will treat as the age at which a young Black man ceases to be a child and begins to be a potential threat, and which means also that the week before his death he was at an age at which he was somebody's child in a way the country should have recognized without instruction. He was your son. He was a brother. He was a friend. He was a wide receiver. He was, by every account I have read of him in the press that has covered his case, the kind of young man his community spoke well of because the community had been given reason to speak well of him. The country did not take any of that into account when it decided which grief would be broadcast and which grief would be processed. The country took it into account that he was a young Black man in Mississippi on a boat on the fifth of July, and the country processed him accordingly, and the country is now, through its grand jury document, asking you to accept the processing. I want to say to you very plainly that you are not obligated to accept the processing. The procedural closure of the state is not the moral closure of the matter. The country wrote the paper. You do not have to sign your name to it.

I want to say what I have come to say now, which is the part Baldwin would call the warning that is also the love. The warning is this. The country's story about your son, the official story, the story written in the margins of the grand jury's no-bill, is the story the country has always written about young Black men whose deaths it would prefer to be able to shelve. That story is not the story of your son. It is the country's story about itself, dressed in the specific language of a specific procedural outcome. The country will try, over the months and the years, to persuade you to adopt its story as your own. It will do this through the smallness of the subsequent news coverage, through the absence of follow-up from the specific institutions that owed Nolan an answer, through the ordinary way the American calendar fills with new names and new griefs and makes the old ones feel, if you are not vigilant, somehow quieter than they were on the night they happened. Do not let it. Do not let your son be absorbed into the country's quiet. Keep saying his name. Keep saying what you know about him. Keep refusing the specific closure the state is trying to hand you, because the state's closure is a convenience to the state and no comfort to a mother or a father, and the country has not earned, by any of its conduct in the ninety days of this investigation, the right to hand convenience to a county at the expense of comfort to a family.

The love is this. You are not alone. There are more families in this country, Black and otherwise, who have been handed the specific document you have been handed and who have been asked to make peace with the specific absence of answers you have been asked to make peace with, than the country's cable networks or morning papers will ever assemble in one room for you to see. Those families are a community you were born into on the morning Nolan did not come home from that boat, and that community will keep you if you reach for it. Reach for it. Christine, Elmore, I will not offer you consolation I do not have the standing to offer. I was raised in a church. I will not pretend, in a letter like this one, that I still live inside it. The specific account of a God who gathers his children home before their time is not an account I keep, and I am not going to borrow it from a tradition I have left in order to hand it to you now, because to do that in a letter of this kind would be a specific form of theft. What I can tell you, from the place I actually stand, is that the country, in some ordinary human corner of itself it has not yet learned to admit, holds the memory of every child it has failed, and that the memory accumulates, and that the memory, if the people who carry it refuse to let it be processed into the country's quiet, becomes, in the long slow way these things become anything at all, the specific pressure that one day forces the counties that wrote your son's story to write a different kind of story for the next son. I do not know the timeline. No father does. What I know is that a letter like this one, written to parents like you by a father like me, is one small entry in that long accumulation, and that there are others, and that you will not know most of them, and that they are being written, this October morning, in kitchens like mine all across the country.

I want to close, as I have been closing these pieces, with what I owe my own children, because I write all of these letters, including this one, for them. My oldest son will be eighteen in January. He is six foot one, a hundred and seventy-five pounds, and he played shooting guard. I want you to notice, because I noticed when I set his measurements down next to your son's, that there is the same height, ten pounds, and a basketball instead of a football between my older boy and yours. The country does not know the difference. The country has never known the difference. And my younger boy, the one for whom I have been sitting in this waiting room all morning, is the other half of the ledger. He is a running back, which means his assignment on Fridays is to run through other people's sons on his way to a line men who are not thinking about him drew on a field. He will go back out there this Friday night, because that is what Friday night is for in a town like ours, and because he has his own mind about what he is willing to risk and does not consult me about it any longer. One or both of my boys will one day be out on a boat, somewhere, with a group of friends, on an American weekend. I will one day get a phone call. I hope the call is one I can answer. I know that there is a world in which the call is the one you got in the small hours of the fifth of July. If that world ever becomes my world, I would want a letter like this one, from a father like me, to arrive at my own kitchen table, and I would want its writer to be as honest with me as I am trying, this morning, to be with you. That is why I am writing. That is the only authority I have claimed in doing it.

Christine. Elmore. Nolan Xavier Wells was your son. He is still your son. The country does not have the final word on who he was, and it does not have the final word on what happened to him, and it does not have the final word on what the two of you are owed. The country has written its paper. The paper is not the record. The record is still being written. I will keep writing my small share of it.

*With love, and with the specific respect of one father for the two of you,*

*Earl O'Garro*
### The Holdout
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-holdout/
Last updated: 2026-09-14T12:39:49.000Z
*By Earl O'Garro*

I am writing this from my office in Connecticut, on a Saturday I had set aside for other work, because the other work can wait and this cannot. I published a piece eleven days ago called “The Why Has Never Mattered,” and I wrote it from this same desk on a Thursday morning while the jury in Plymouth was still deliberating, and the argument I made was simple enough that I can restate it in a single sentence: this country decides in advance whose interior is worth entering, and the sorting has nothing to do with conduct. I named the mothers. I named the dead children. I named the shelter in the Bronx and the pink shirts outside the courthouse and the seven-figure fundraiser and the five-part documentary and every mile of the road the press built toward Duxbury and never thought to grade toward Dimone Fleming. And I closed the piece the way I close all of these pieces, with what I owe my children, and I went home. The jury sent its second note the next morning. Judge Sullivan declared a mistrial on the fourth. And then, on the eleventh of September, a juror named Paula Devlin sat down on CBS Mornings across from Gayle King and said the words that have sent this country into a week of the most revealing confusion I have witnessed in my adult life. The holdout, she said, was the only Black person on the jury.

Let me name the argument at the top of this page and spend the rest defending it. That man did not fail his duty. He performed it. He performed it in the only country he has ever lived in, which is a country that has never once extended to a defendant who looked like him the courtesy it spent three and a half years building for Lindsay Clancy, and when he declined to extend it himself, when he sat in that room with eleven white jurors and said no, the country did not pause to wonder whether his refusal might contain a lifetime of information about how the law has treated people who share his face. It called him arrogant. It called him stubborn. NBC came to his house. They contacted his family. They pulled his landlord. They dug up an old domestic violence allegation and an active restraining order and twelve thousand dollars in unpaid rent, and they did this to a citizen whose only public act was to vote his conscience in a jury room, which is the single thing the Constitution asks of him and the single thing the Constitution promises he may do without reprisal. That is the argument. The rest is evidence.

I want to stay on the word arrogant, because the word is doing work, and I do not think the people using it have stopped to listen to what it is saying. Eleven jurors, all of them white, voted to acquit a white woman of killing her three children on the ground that her mind was not her own when she did it. One juror, the only Black person in the room, voted to convict. He did not, according to every account now public, produce a binder of counter-evidence. He did not deliver a closing argument. He said, by the foreperson’s own description, that she viciously killed her children, and he could not get past it. And the eleven called him arrogant. Consider what that word contains. It contains the assumption that his position required justification and theirs did not. It contains the belief that the medical evidence presented by the defense was self-evidently dispositive, such that any person of ordinary intelligence who refused to accept it must be defective in character. It contains, whether the people using it know this or not, the precise inversion of the pattern I described eleven days ago, because for the first time in this story a Black person is being asked to explain his why, and the people asking are white, and they have decided before the conversation starts that nothing he produces will be sufficient, and they are leaking his name and his address and his court records to make sure the next person who sits in that chair understands the cost.

Now the Gayle King moment, which is the cleanest piece of evidence this country has produced about itself in years. King is a Black woman who got her start on Channel 3 in Hartford, which is my city, and has been in broadcast journalism for decades. She has covered race and criminal justice for her entire career. And when Devlin said the words, King closed her eyes and said, “Whoa. I have to sit with that for just a second.” I do not think King said anything wrong. I think she said something involuntary, which is more useful, because involuntary reactions are diagnostic. What she was processing, in that second with her eyes closed, was the collision between two assumptions she had been carrying at the same time. The first assumption was that the holdout juror was a white man, probably older, probably unsympathetic to mental health defenses, the kind of juror whose refusal could be filed under the ordinary stubbornness of people who do not read. The second assumption, which she would never have stated and may never have consciously held, was that a Black juror would have sided with the majority, because the majority position was the compassionate one, the educated one, the one that cared about the why. Those two assumptions cannot survive the same fact, and in the second it took her to close her eyes the country watched one of its most sophisticated Black journalists discover that she had been carrying a version of the same expectation the system carries, which is that Black people will perform their Blackness in a predictable direction, and when they do not, something must be explained.

I wrote eleven days ago that the press built a road toward Duxbury and never graded one toward the Bronx, and I described the road in detail, the New Yorker profile, the Slate essay, the STAT reporting, the PBS documentary, the three hundred people in pink shirts. I said the road was not a conspiracy but a pipeline, and that pipelines have intakes calibrated to detect certain things and not others. Now I have to add a chapter I did not anticipate. The road was not only built toward a defendant. It was built toward a jury, and the jury was expected to drive on it, and eleven of them did, and the one who did not is now being dismantled in public so that the next twelve understand what is expected of them. That is not accountability. That is intimidation dressed as journalism, and the people doing it have not troubled themselves to notice that the man they are dismantling is the same man their system has spent four hundred years declining to wonder about.

I said in the previous piece that the asymmetry is not about sympathy. It is about curiosity. The country is willing to loathe a white defendant and still grant her an interior, a why, a sequence of events it considers itself obligated to excavate. It has never extended that curiosity to us. And now a Black man has returned the favor. He sat in a room where eleven people asked him to be curious about a white woman’s mind, and he said no, and the no did not come from nowhere. It came from a country that has never been curious about his. It came from every courtroom that looked at China Arnold and saw a punchline instead of a person. It came from every sentencing hearing where a Black mother’s poverty was treated as her decision rather than her condition. It came from Debra Harrell’s seventeen days in a cell for letting her daughter play in a park, and from Shaquan Duley’s thirty-five years built on a single wire story that nobody ever bothered to follow up. That juror carried all of that into the deliberation room, because he is a human being and human beings carry what they have lived, and the eleven who called him arrogant did not ask what he had lived, because they were not curious. They were certain, which is the opposite of curious, and certainty about a Black man’s interior is the oldest American habit there is.

So let me say it plainly, because I have learned by now that if I do not say it plainly somebody will say I was being coy. I do not know whether that juror was right. I was not in the courtroom. I did not hear the testimony. I did not see the bloodwork or sit through the cross-examinations. What I know is that he had a constitutional right to vote his conscience, and that his conscience is not required to be identical to mine or to the eleven people who disagreed with him, and that the act of disagreeing with eleven white jurors in a room where he was the only Black face is not arrogance. In a country that has spent centuries ensuring that Black people’s reasons for doing things are never investigated, never wondered about, never granted the weight of interiority, a Black man who refuses to extend the very courtesy that has been withheld from him is not failing the system. He is the system’s own product, behaving exactly as the system taught him to behave, which is to look at the act and not the why, because the why has never mattered.

I said I would close with what I owe my children and I am going to keep that promise. My children are growing up in a country where three hundred people in pink shirts can assemble outside a courthouse to demand that a jury consider why a mother did what she did, and that is a beautiful thing, and I mean that without irony, and I want every mother in America to be able to walk that road. But my children are also growing up in a country where a Black man who sat on a jury and voted his conscience is having his landlord called and his court records published and his photograph circulated, and the lesson being taught to every Black person watching is the same lesson this country has always taught, which is that your interior does not matter when the country needs you to convict, and your interior does not matter when the country needs you to acquit, and if you make the wrong choice in either direction your life will be taken apart by people who have never wondered for a single second what it is like to be you.

I do not know how to protect my children from that. I am not sure it is possible. What I can do is write it down, with the names and the dates in it, so that when they ask me one day why the country extended its curiosity in one direction and not the other, and why a man was destroyed for noticing, there is a record. There is always a record, if somebody sits down and makes one.

The why has never mattered. I wrote that eleven days ago. The holdout knew it before I did.
### The Why Has Never Mattered
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-why-has-never-mattered/
Last updated: 2026-09-03T20:22:59.000Z
*By Earl O'Garro*

I ordinarily write these pieces from home, early, before the day has made any claim on me. I am writing this one from my office in Connecticut, in the middle of a Thursday morning I had set aside for other work, because I stopped that work in order to sit down and read. I have been having a version of the same conversation for two weeks, with friends and with family, about a case in Massachusetts, and it has gone badly enough and often enough that I decided I owed the subject some research before I said another word out loud about it. So the morning went to reading instead. And what I keep coming back to is a photograph from the twentieth of August. Three hundred people, nearly all of them women, standing outside Plymouth Superior Court in pink shirts. The shirts said Believe. They said She Needed Help. They said Peace For Lindsay. What holds me is not the people in the photograph, who I take to be sincere, and who I do not think are owed my contempt. What holds me is the question of how they got there. Three hundred citizens do not assemble outside a county courthouse in matching shirts by spontaneous combustion. Somebody built the road they drove in on. That road was built by the American press, over a period of about three and a half years, out of a set of editorial decisions that were made one at a time and that nobody has ever been asked to defend as a whole.

So let me name the argument at the top of the page and spend the rest of the piece defending it. This country's press does not distribute human interiority according to what people have done. It distributes it according to who people are. It decides, case by case, which citizens get to have a mind that a reader is invited to enter and which citizens are simply the thing that happened, and that decision does not track conduct at all. It is not a mercy system. Monstrous behavior is no barrier to being humanized, and blameless behavior is no guarantee of it. The press runs a factory with two products coming off the same line, sympathy and outrage, and the sorting of raw material into one or the other is made upstream of anything the person actually did.

I am going to make that case using a set of American mothers, which means I am going to be writing about dead children, and I want to be plain before I go one sentence further. Cora Clancy was five years old. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months, and he held on for three days after the other two before he died as well. They were killed in their house in Duxbury on the twenty-fourth of January, 2023\. Three children are dead. I care that three children are dead. Nothing in the rest of this piece is an argument that I do not, and any reader who arrives at that conclusion has decided in advance what kind of man is writing and is no longer reading the sentences.

And let me be equally plain about the illness, because it would be cheap to build an argument on the pretense that the why in this case is empty. It is not empty. There is a real thing there and I have done the reading and I can describe it. Postpartum psychosis is not the baby blues with the volume turned up. It is a rupture. It arrives fast, usually inside the first weeks, and it brings hallucination and delusion and a collapse of sleep so total that the mind begins to come apart from the inside. It appears in something like one or two births in a thousand. The clinicians who treat it will tell you that it is lethal and also that it is highly treatable, which is a pair of facts worth sitting inside, because together they mean the deaths it produces belong to the category of deaths that did not have to happen. And here is the detail that ought to embarrass the entire medical apparatus of this country: the American Psychiatric Association does not carry postpartum psychosis as a diagnosis of its own. The thing has a body count and no name. The woman in Duxbury was a labor and delivery nurse. She had spent nine years at Massachusetts General Hospital in the very room where this illness begins, holding other women through the hours when it begins. She knew the vocabulary and by every account she tried to use it about herself. She was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. She was prescribed, across a few months, a long column of drugs whose names her defense read into the record, sertraline and lorazepam and hydroxyzine and buspirone and trazodone and fluoxetine, and then on a single day in late November of 2022, three more. She was sleeping about three hours a night. She went into McLean Hospital on New Year's Day and came out five days later, and three weeks after that her children were dead. I can follow every inch of that. If you asked me whether a system failed that woman I would say obviously, visibly, in writing, with dates. My argument is not that the why is a fiction. My argument is about who gets one written for them.

Now watch how the road got built. Four days after the children died her husband posted a statement, and he wrote about each of the three of them, and then he wrote about his wife, and then he asked the public for something remarkable. He asked us to forgive her, as he had. That was the twenty-eighth of January, 2023, and it changed the temperature of the entire story overnight, because it handed every assignment editor in the country a frame. A fundraising page for the family drew donations reported in the seven figures. In the autumn of 2024 The New Yorker published a long profile of the husband in which he said that he had not been married to a monster but to someone who got sick, and that is a beautifully made sentence, and it did a portion of the defense's work eighteen months before the defense began. The recordings of that interview were later subpoenaed and the writer was drawn into the case, which tells you how much load the story had come to bear. By the time the trial opened this past July the machinery was fully assembled, and it ran on schedule. Slate published a first-person essay whose argument was, in effect, that could have been me. STAT wrote about it twice, once on the unfinished science and once on what the case is doing to the willingness of reproductive psychiatrists to take patients at all. NPR wrote about the gaps in diagnosis. CNN put maternal mental health in the spotlight. The PBS NewsHour ran a piece on a broken postpartum system. The Globe, Forbes, Psychiatric Times. CBS gave it a five-episode arc of 48 Hours. Court TV gave it something like twenty episodes. Somebody stood up a feed carrying gavel-to-gavel trial audio for any citizen who wanted to sit and listen to all of it, and citizens did. On Beacon Hill, legislators filed a bill that would require a perinatal mental health assessment inside forty-eight hours for any defendant charged within a year of giving birth, would divert her toward treatment instead of prosecution, would make postpartum illness a mitigating factor at sentencing, and would open retroactive review for women already serving time whose postpartum minds were never considered at all. The bill did not advance. Advocates intend to bring it back, and I hope they succeed, and I want that on the record too.

Every item in that paragraph is defensible on its own. That is exactly the point I am making. No individual editor did anything wrong. The Slate essay is honest, the STAT reporting is serious, the legislative push is humane, and the three hundred women in pink are not villains. What I am describing is not a conspiracy. It is a pipeline, and pipelines have intakes, and the question I cannot get past is what the intake is calibrated to detect.

Because on the twenty-fourth of August, 2026, ten days before those pink shirts became a national story and while the jury in Plymouth was still hearing evidence, a judge in Bronx Criminal Court found a woman named Dimone Fleming not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect for the deaths of her two sons. Daishawn was three years old. Octavius was eleven months. They were found in a bathtub in a family shelter in November of 2022, two months before Duxbury, with stab wounds in their necks. The psychiatrists retained by the prosecution and the psychiatrists retained by the defense arrived at the same conclusion. She had been grossly psychotic. She had been hallucinating. She believed the world was ending and that a spirit had entered her body. Because both sides agreed, there was no jury and there was no trial. The prosecution's own expert said it out loud. She had been found, in the period before the killings, naked and ranting and setting fires, and a relative asked afterward why, when they took her away, nobody had thought to check on the children. She was twenty-two years old and she was living in a shelter.

Read that again and notice that the law did its work. The Bronx did not deny that woman her why. Her own prosecutor's doctor handed it to her, which means this is not a story about a courtroom that could not be made to look at a poor young mother's mind. The courtroom looked. It is a story about what the country did with what the courtroom found, which was nothing. There was no rally. Nobody printed shirts. There is no long profile in a national magazine, no seven-figure fundraiser, no five-part documentary, no bill on any statehouse calendar with her name in the air behind it, no legislator quoting her file on the floor. The local ABC station covered it. And then the story was picked up, with real enthusiasm, by Breitbart and a rotating cast of aggregators, who ran it not as a tragedy of the maternal mental health system but as an outrage, an item, evidence that mothers are getting away with things. Same illness. Same defense. Same statutory standard, near enough. Same month. One woman became a movement and the other became content. Two products, one line.

And I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this argument is that America withholds sympathy from Black and poor defendants, and the easy version is not quite right, and a piece that rests on it will come apart in the hands of any hostile reader. Consider what the country has done with white women it despises. Susan Smith drove her two little boys into John D. Long Lake in Union, South Carolina, in 1994, and then told this country, for nine days, that a Black man in a knit cap had taken them. Sit with the conduct in that sentence. She did not only kill her children. She reached into the country's oldest loaded story and fired it at every Black man within driving distance of her town, and for nine days law enforcement and the national press went looking for a man who did not exist while actual men were pulled in and looked at and asked to account for their evenings. That is dehumanizing behavior of a very specific and very deliberate kind, executed by a woman who understood precisely which lever she was pulling and how reliably it would work. And the country still read her diaries. It still excavated her marriage, her stepfather, her affairs, her psychiatric history, her childhood in Union. There are books. There are documentaries. There was a parole hearing in November of 2024, thirty years on, covered by every national outlet, at which the country once again went over the interior of Susan Smith. She was hated the entire time. She was also, the entire time, a person with a mind that the press considered it its business to investigate. Casey Anthony was hated, and her every psychological detail was chewed over for years. Darlie Routier is on death row in Texas and no one has lifted a finger for her, and her case is still argued in forensic detail by people who want to know what was in her head that night.

So the mechanism is not mercy. Hatred is not the disqualifier. The country is perfectly willing to loathe a white woman and still grant her an interior, a history, a sequence of events, a why that it considers itself obligated to go and dig up. It believes there is something in there to find. That is the asymmetry, and it is not about sympathy at all. It is about curiosity. Curiosity is the thing that has never been extended to us.

Set the row out and look at it. Andrea Yates drowned five children in Houston in 2001\. Prosecutors asked for her death, the jury refused and gave her life, an appeals court threw the conviction out because a prosecution psychiatrist had testified to something untrue, and at the retrial in July of 2006 she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a state hospital rather than a prison. Twenty-five years on her lawyer is still giving interviews about her, the anniversary is still covered, and she is still discussed as this country's great cautionary tale about a mind nobody caught in time. Deanna Laney killed two of her sons with stones in Texas in 2003 and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Dena Schlosser cut the arms from her ten-month-old daughter in Texas in 2004, and her first jury hung, and her second found her not guilty by reason of insanity. Three women, three hospitals, three long public conversations about the interior weather of a mother. Now China Arnold, whose daughter Paris Talley was twenty-eight days old when she was put in a microwave in Dayton in 2005\. Prosecutors announced they would seek her death. It took three trials, a mistrial and a reversal, before she was convicted of aggravated murder in 2011 and given life without the possibility of parole. Her name still functions in this country as a punchline and a horror, and I have never in twenty years encountered a single essay wondering what had happened inside her mind, and I have gone looking for one. Now Shaquan Duley, who smothered her two sons in an Orangeburg motel in August of 2010 and rolled her car into the Edisto River, after an argument with her own mother about whether she was caring for the boys properly. She pleaded guilty. She took thirty-five years. There was no bill, no rally, no reconstruction of her sleep or her prescriptions or her postpartum months. She simply went in, and she is scheduled to come out in 2045, and if you have opinions about her you formed them out of one wire story.

Now run the machine in the other direction, at the low end of the severity scale, where the conduct is not monstrous at all, because that is where the sorting shows itself most nakedly. Debra Harrell was working a shift at a McDonald's in North Augusta, South Carolina, in the summer of 2014, and she let her nine-year-old daughter play at the neighborhood park with a cell phone, because that is what a woman does when she has a shift and no childcare. She was arrested for felony child neglect. She spent seventeen days in a jail cell. She lost custody of her daughter and she lost her job. Nobody asked why. There was understood to be nothing there to wonder about. Her circumstances were not treated as a condition that had produced a decision, they were treated as the decision. Shanesha Taylor was homeless in Arizona that same year and left a two-year-old and a six-month-old in a car while she sat in a job interview, and was charged with felony child abuse, and took ten years of probation. The whole cause of her conduct was legible in a single sentence. She had no house and she needed work. That is a why. It is a better documented why than most of the ones the country has spent this summer assembling. It was available free of charge to anyone who cared to pick it up, and the country declined to pick it up. Seventeen days in a cell for a park, against seven figures and three boxes of letters for Duxbury. I am not putting those women into competition, because they are not in competition. They are in the same country, and the country is the point.

Now the medicine, because the sorting starts a long way upstream of any newsroom, and this is the part that should trouble a reader most. Black women in this country are screened for postpartum mood disorders less often than white women. Among the women who do screen positive, Black women are diagnosed less than half as often as white women who screened positive at the same level. When the diagnosis does come it comes later, and referral to therapy and prescription of medication are both less likely to follow. Which means the entire narrative now running at full volume around Duxbury, the narrative in which a mother was sick and the system did not catch her, is a plain description of the ordinary and unremarkable experience of Black motherhood in America, and it has never once produced three hundred people in matching shirts. The why is not merely withheld from us by editors. It is withheld from us clinically, at the appointment, in the chart. You cannot be excused by an illness that nobody has bothered to write down. The diagnosis that becomes a defense at trial is a document, and documents are issued by the same institutions that decided a long time ago whose pain requires investigating. And when the case does reach a jury, the pattern holds. Researchers put a defendant in front of mock jurors and changed only two variables, his race and his diagnosis. When the defendant was white, the diagnosis did not much matter. When the defendant was Black, jurors were significantly more likely to convict if his illness was schizophrenia rather than depression. Same facts, same plea. The psychosis that renders a white defendant sympathetic renders a Black one frightening, because in the American imagination psychosis and Blackness are already filed in the same drawer, and the drawer is labeled dangerous, and putting the two together does not produce compassion. It produces confirmation.

So when someone says out loud that if the woman in Duxbury had been Black then this movement would not have assembled, and the room calls that silly, I want to stay on that word, because the word is doing work. It was not called false. It was called silly, which is what we call a true thing we would rather not hold. And now we have something better than an opinion about it. We have a case running in parallel, ten days apart, in the same country, under the same defense, decided the same way, and one of them produced a bill and a magazine profile and three hundred shirts and the other produced a Breitbart item. You can reach your own conclusion about the variable. Mine is on the page. But the honest version of my argument does not require anyone to share it, because it requires only agreement on what the variable was not. It was not the illness. It was not the law. It was not the number of dead children.

What I object to, then, is not that this country found compassion for a woman in Duxbury. It is the sudden, national, bottomless appetite for truth and facts and evidence and context and nuance, appearing all at once, inside a press that has never once extended that appetite to a defendant who looked like me. Everyone became a clinician in a single news cycle. Everyone wanted the full picture before judgment. Everyone discovered a passion for the sequence of events. And I have been alive long enough to know where that passion travels and where it does not, and I have Dimone Fleming's name and the date of her ruling and the fact that most readers of this page had to learn both of them from me. The word for that is not bias, which is too soft, and it is not conspiracy, which is too grand. The word is manufacture. Outrage is manufactured and so is sympathy, and both are made to order from the same raw material, which is a dead child and a living defendant, and the only thing that determines which product comes off the line is the identity of the person the machine is pointed at.

As I write this on Thursday morning, the jury in Plymouth has told the judge twice that it cannot agree. Thirty hours in, they sent out a note saying they were still unable to reach a unanimous decision, and the judge gave them the charge Massachusetts gives a jury it does not want to lose, and they went back in at nine o'clock. By the time you read this there may be a verdict and there may be a mistrial, and I want to be clear that I am not writing about the verdict. The verdict is the law's business and the law can have it. I am writing about the road that three hundred people drove in on, and about the fact that no such road was ever graded toward a shelter in the Bronx.

I want to close, as I have been closing these pieces, with what I owe my children. Three children are dead in Duxbury. Two are dead in a shelter in the Bronx. Five are dead in Houston, two in a lake in Union, two in the Edisto River, one in a microwave in Dayton. And mine are alive, in a country that has already decided how much wondering their inner lives are worth, and the number is low. That is not an abstraction I read about. It is the calculation I run on an ordinary Tuesday when one of my children misses the bus and I have to work out how to get him to school, and getting him to school is not a logistics problem but a safety problem, because to a great many people his body does not matter and is not entitled to occupy certain places at certain hours. It is the calculation I ran earlier this week when he asked me to drive a friend home to Hartford, and I was tired in the way that is not really about sleep, and I got my keys anyway, because the alternative was a Latino child standing on a sidewalk while the light went out of the sky, waiting to be asked to account for himself, waiting to explain that he is a student, that he is fourteen, that he is going home. Explanations of that kind are not always accepted. Sometimes they are not even heard. The country that will not wonder about Dimone Fleming is the same country that will not wonder about that boy on the sidewalk, and it is the same country that will one day be asked to wonder about mine.

So what I owe them is not the performance of grief in the register this country finds acceptable, offered up in exchange for permission to describe the pattern. What I owe them is the description, written down plainly, with the names and the dates in it, so that when they are old enough to ask why the country wondered so hard about one mother and not at all about another, there is a document in the house that answers them.

Which is why I am going to stop here and close the laptop. I need to get home and care for my children, and I want to be in the house before the light goes. I have spent an entire morning reading about a country that decides in advance whose interior is worth entering, and about the specific children that decision has already been made against, and there is a limit to how long a man can sit with that and still be of any use at a desk. What I want now is the small domestic version of the thing this whole piece has been about. I want to sit in a room with my own children and ask them how the day went and listen to the answer as though the answer contains a person, which it does. That is the entire courtesy I have been describing all morning. It is not complicated. It does not require a magazine profile or a bill on Beacon Hill or three hundred people in matching shirts. It costs nothing at all. It is simply never extended to everyone.

The why has never mattered. It was never supposed to. It is not a question this country asks in order to learn something about a person. It is a courtesy it extends to the people it has already decided are people. My children are going to need that courtesy one day, from somebody who has not yet decided anything about them, and I would like it to exist by the time they do.

I intend to keep writing until it does.
### The Sentence That Was Not the Sentence
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-sentence-that-was-not-the-sentence/
Last updated: 2026-08-16T13:30:08.000Z
*By Earl O'Garro*

There is a sentence a court was able to make Luigi Mangione say in a Manhattan courtroom on Friday morning, and there is a set of sentences the same court has never been willing to make anyone at United Health Group say, and the whole subject of this piece is the specific and defended and legally armed difference between the two sets of sentences. Let me name the difference at the top of the page and I will spend the rest of the piece defending the naming.

The sentence Mr. Mangione was made to say is this one. I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan and he died. He said it out loud, under oath, before a federal judge named Margaret Garnett, on an open plea to two counts of interstate stalking resulting in death. His sentencing arrives on the eighteenth of December. The maximum, the judge told him plainly, is life. That is what the country's legal apparatus was able to extract from a twenty-seven-year-old citizen who acted, alone, against a single corporate officer, on a single morning outside a single Manhattan hotel. The apparatus knew exactly what to do with him. It knew what statute to apply. It knew what plea to accept. It knew what number to attach to his coming captivity. The apparatus was legible, forceful, and fast.

Now the other set of sentences. The sentences that no executive of the United Health Group has ever had to say, out loud, under oath, before any federal judge, about the deaths for which the company he ran has, in the aggregate, been responsible. Those sentences would sound, if they were ever said, something like these. We denied post-acute rehabilitation care to Ms. X and she died. We rejected the third appeal of Mr. Y and he died. Our algorithm at naviHealth marked the claim of Mrs. Z as low-priority and she died. Ninety percent of the denials that algorithm produced were reversed on appeal, which is the plain arithmetical statement that ninety percent of those denials were wrong, and that the small share of our members who could afford the counsel and the time to appeal prevailed, and that the much larger share who could not, did not. Those sentences would fill a courtroom. They would fill several courtrooms. They would occupy, if spoken one by one in the same slow cadence with which Mr. Mangione was made to read his sentence, months of a country's calendar. They will not be spoken. The country's apparatus, which knew exactly what to do with Mr. Mangione, does not know what to do with United Health Group, and has arranged its own institutions in such a way that the not-knowing is enforceable at law and at scale.

Let me now say, from the kitchen table in Connecticut where I write these pieces on this Sunday morning two days after Mr. Mangione's plea, the thing I would rather say once, cleanly, than dance around for the next several paragraphs. I sympathize with Luigi Mangione. I want that plain on the page before any other sentence goes by, because the argument I am going to make requires a register of moral honesty that the country's ordinary political vocabulary has been badly out of practice with, and I do not intend to sound like a man who is smuggling a defense of Mr. Mangione through a paragraph of qualifications. I sympathize with him. I sympathize with him not as a partisan of any ideology and not as an apologist for any violence but as a reader of the specific human record he left behind before the country loaded his name onto its front pages. He was a graduate of a good high school and a good university. He was, by every measurable a serious civilization is entitled to use, the kind of young human being a serious civilization should have been organizing itself to preserve. He built things with his mind. He read widely. He held work that added value to the world. He was a producer. He was not a middleman. He was not, in the plain sense of the word, a parasite. He was one of the people a country like this one is supposed to be for. And the system that took that producer and ground him, over months and over years, into whatever combination of grief and rage and physical suffering he was on the morning of the fourth of December, 2024, is the system this piece exists to name.

I sympathize with him for a second reason, which is the philosophical reason, and which I want to state plainly because I do not think a writer who owes his readers a truthful sentence is entitled to bury it inside a hedge. A civilization that requires its productive citizens to submit, silently and without recourse, to the specific slow destruction of themselves and their families by an actuarial process they cannot appeal is not a civilization those citizens are morally required to accept. That is a philosophical claim. I am making it. I am not going to unmake it. Whatever else Mr. Mangione did in the seconds outside the Hilton, the record of the years before those seconds is the record of a producer who had been told, by the system he lived inside, that the system had the standing to end him and his people at leisure and that he had no standing to end anything back. The country's law, on Friday morning, told him that even the framing of that no standing was a lie. He had standing. He used it. The country he used it against knows it, which is why the country is now unable, two days into the aftermath of his plea, to make its stated moral condemnation stick with any measurable share of its own population.

I sympathize with the many, too, and I want them named. I sympathize with the woman in Utica whose husband died on the wrong side of an nH Predict denial and who did not shoot anyone. I sympathize with the father in Baton Rouge whose daughter died of a manageable cancer that the algorithm marked non-urgent and who did not shoot anyone. I sympathize with the son in Muncie who is going through the bankruptcy paperwork at his kitchen table this weekend over the bills from the year of his mother's dying and who did not shoot anyone. I sympathize with the millions of Americans who go, every quarter, into medical debt collection because a claim they were owed was denied by an algorithm whose error rate was ninety percent and whose designers knew the error rate was ninety percent, and who did not shoot anyone. Most of what a country like this asks its ordinary citizens to bear it will never see them bearing. Most of what a country like this asks its ordinary citizens to bear is what makes the ones who cannot bear it any longer, snap. I do not endorse the snapping. I understand the snapping. Those are two different sentences and both of them belong on the page.

Now the financial page. Let me use the words the numbers require, because this is the financial page, and one of the small vandalisms that has been done to the American financial press over the last two decades is that the numbers on the financial page are almost never described using words that name what they are.

In the twenty months after Mr. Thompson was shot, the market wrote down the value of United Health Group by approximately two hundred and seventy-seven billion dollars. The word for what the market wrote down is not risk. Not reputational damage. Not shifting sentiment. The word is fear. The market was afraid of what would happen next. In the same twenty months, the company's denial rate on Affordable Care Act marketplace claims fell from thirty-three percent to twenty percent. Thirteen points, in twelve months, on one line of business. The word for what the company did in response to the fear is not compliance. Not improvement. Not accountability. The word is confession. The company confessed, by moving thirteen points in twelve months, that it had known for a decade that thirteen points of its denial rate were denials it could not defend on medical grounds, and that it had been running those denials anyway, because until the fear arrived no one had made it stop. Every American family who was on the wrong side of those thirteen points, in the years before the shot, was on the wrong side of a business choice. Not a medical judgment. A business choice. Some of those families were burying people in those years. Some of them are still, on this Sunday morning in August, trying to work out the medical debt from the funerals.

Let me now name what the shot did, because the plainest account of it is the account that the country would rather not read. The shot did what a decade of regulatory rulemaking, a decade of congressional oversight hearings, a decade of civil litigation, and a decade of ordinary organized political petitioning had failed to do. The country's regulators had not moved thirteen points. The country's Congress had not moved thirteen points. The country's civil bar, for all its important work, had not moved thirteen points inside twelve months. The market did. What made the market move was the shot. That is a fact I do not enjoy typing, and I want you to know that I do not enjoy typing it, and I am typing it anyway because it is a fact.

There is a larger fact standing behind that one, and I have to name it here because a piece like this one does not honestly cohere without it. The United States government, as an institution, has for the better part of its existence responded only to disrespect and to violence. That is not a moral claim I am making. It is an observation about the country's institutional character. Petitions have been ignored for two hundred and fifty years. Marches have been ignored for two hundred and fifty years. Op-eds, testimony at hearings, letters to representatives, the ordinary organized submissions of citizens through the legitimate channels, have been, on the specific historical record, effective only in the moments when those legitimate submissions were accompanied by, or immediately followed by, some unavoidable disruption of the country's ordinary business. The country did not desegregate its schools because Black parents asked it to. It desegregated its schools because Black children endured, on national television, the specific violence of the response to their asking. The labor movement did not win the eight-hour day because organizers argued for it in the pages of the daily press. The labor movement won the eight-hour day because Haymarket and Homestead and Ludlow made the country's industrial calculus untenable. The AIDS crisis did not draw federal attention because doctors testified that it was killing gay men by the thousands in the first half of the 1980s. It drew federal attention because ACT UP staged, in the second half of the same decade, the specific kind of dramatic public disruption a country like this one is organized to answer. That is the country. I am describing it. I am not endorsing it. But if we do not name what the country is when we are trying to explain why the country responded to the shot outside the Hilton, then we are lying to ourselves about the country, and I am not, on this page, in the business of lying to my readers about the country. The country responds to disrespect. The country responds to violence. It responds, in the specific timelines that matter to its ordinary citizens, to very little else. Mr. Mangione, without any reader of mine endorsing the decision he made, made a decision that was, on the country's own operating manual, calibrated correctly against the specific American institution he was trying to move. That is the ugliest sentence in this piece, and I have written it, and I am going to leave it standing.

Now, the questions. Because the piece requires them and because I would rather see them asked on this page than see them left to another author who is not going to ask them as directly.

How many Luigi Mangiones does a country produce before it will look at what it has been building? How many producers must be ground into pulp by the private grief of a denied claim before the machine that denied the claim will be subject to the ordinary criminal law any other American would face for a knowing killing? How many appeals must be filed at the rate of ninety percent reversal before the country will recognize that the appeal process is a shell that has been built to look like justice? How many families must bury their people in the specific slow way that a rehabilitation denial produces before the country agrees that a rehabilitation denial, delivered by an executive who knew the rate at which the denials were being reversed on appeal and made the executive decision to keep issuing them, is a kind of murder? I am asking. I want the questions answered. I am not going to accept, on this page, the answers that would let the country escape the answering.

Let me now say what I want, since a reader who has patiently followed me this far is entitled to see the demand named.

I want a country that will name the actuarial killing of the American health-insurance industry using the same criminal vocabulary it uses for the pistol homicide of a corporate officer. I want a country whose statutes carry the specific weight of criminal liability against the executive who knowingly deploys an algorithm with a ninety-percent appeal-reversal rate. I want the Department of Justice, when it is next occupied by an administration serious enough to take this seriously, to bring the case. I want the ordinary citizen who has been on the wrong side of a denied claim to have a legally armed cause of action that does not require the personal wealth of a plaintiff. I want the primary electorates of the country to continue what Michigan started last Tuesday, which is the electoral removal of members of Congress whose portfolios have been paid for by the industries most in need of policing. I want the reader of this piece to treat every denied claim in the reader's own life as a public entry on a public ledger, appealed publicly, so that the ledger becomes legible and the country can no longer pretend not to know. The company moved thirteen points because the tape moved. The next time the company is made to move, I want the number to be higher, and I want the mechanism to arrive without another gun. That is the demand. I am naming it. I am asking the reader to name it too.

I want to close, as I have been closing these pieces, with what I owe my children. My children are the ones for whom the ledger being kept in this country is being kept. What I owe them, this Sunday morning at home two days after Friday's plea in a Manhattan courtroom, is not the pretense that individual violence and corporate violence are two separate kinds of violence living in two separate moral universes. They are not. They live in the same universe. They kill the same kinds of people. They leave the same kinds of empty chairs at the same kinds of dinner tables. What I owe my children is the discipline of saying that plainly, and the discipline of continuing to work, at the ballot and at the keyboard and at the small daily table where I do my thinking, on the specific institutional arrangements that will allow a country to name both kinds and to hold both of them accountable.

Brian Thompson had a family. Every American whose claim was denied and who did not survive the denial had one too. Both of those sentences are true. Both belong on the record. Both belong in the sentence a country tells its children when the children are old enough to ask.

The sentence Mr. Mangione had to say on Friday morning is on the record. The sentences the executives of the United Health Group will never be asked to say are not. That is not because the second set of sentences is not true. It is because the country has decided, so far, that they will not be spoken. That decision is not a fact of nature. It is a choice, made every year, by human beings in specific rooms. Those rooms can be entered. Those choices can be reversed.

I intend to keep writing until they are.
### An Answer From Michigan
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/an-answer-from-michigan/
Last updated: 2026-08-06T10:13:07.000Z
*By Earl O'Garro*

I was awake late on Tuesday, at the kitchen table where I have written most of what you have read from me this year, with the returns from a Democratic primary in Michigan on the screen and the small provisional stillness of a man who has been waiting, for the better part of the summer, to see whether the thing he has been arguing for on this page would prove out on the actual returns board of an actual American election, or whether the arguing itself was going to have to carry him through another six months of losing before the ledger began to turn.

The ledger turned on Tuesday.

An epidemiologist named Abdul El-Sayed, the son of an Egyptian immigrant, born in Detroit, forty-one years old, holder of a medical degree from Columbia and a doctorate from Oxford, who has never before held elected office in the ordinary sense of the word, who spent the year facing an outside-money apparatus that spent something on the order of fifty-four million dollars against him and five million for him at a ratio of nearly eleven to one, who was opposed by the sitting governor of his own state, who was opposed by the majority leader of his own party, who was opposed by every institutional decoration a Democratic Senate primary in a swing state can be opposed by, won the primary. He won it by roughly a point. He now advances to the November general election as the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate in Michigan. And the single largest contribution to the money that was thrown at him and failed, larger than any corporate PAC contribution and larger than the party-establishment contributions combined, was more than thirty million dollars from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is the most that particular apparatus has ever spent to defeat a single Democratic candidate since it began operating in 2022.

I want you to sit with that number for a moment before I go on. Thirty million dollars, from one lobby, in one state, in one primary, to defeat one candidate whose principal disqualifying trait, as measured by the lobby's own internal criteria, was that he had been publicly, morally, and eloquently opposed to the war on Gaza and, later, to the war we are now prosecuting on Israel's behalf against Iran. They spent that money. They lost anyway.

Let me tell you what that means.

I have written about this machinery all year, and if you have been reading me you will already know the shape of the argument. Thomas Massie, in Kentucky, this past spring, at a cost the ordinary congressional campaign cannot conceive of, for the specific offense of having read the Constitution honestly, was defeated in his primary and lost his seat. I wrote at the time that his defeat was the sentence every currently serving member of Congress would carry in his pocket for the rest of the cycle. I still believe that. What I want you to notice this morning is that the sentence has been joined, in the same pocket, by a second sentence, and the second sentence is a different sentence entirely, and the second sentence is that the money can be beaten. Massie's defeat instructed the Congress that the money is decisive. El-Sayed's victory has just instructed the same Congress that the money is no longer decisive. Those are not merely different lessons. They are opposite lessons. And the members of the House and Senate who carry both sentences in their pockets over the next several months are going to make private accountings about which sentence they intend to build the next chapter of their careers around, and the accountings, on the historical record of Republics under this kind of pressure, will not all break in the direction they would have broken in April.

I want to be specific, because the general points I am about to make are the kind of general points a reader with any patience deserves to see grounded in specifics.

The first specific is that a thirty-million-dollar spend against one Democratic Senate primary candidate, which then loses the primary by a point, is not the sign of a lobby that is priced correctly against the current electorate. It is the sign of a lobby whose marginal dollar has stopped moving votes at the rate its donors have been told to expect. When the marginal dollar of a political-influence operation stops moving votes at the priced rate, the donors ask, in the private conversations that donor classes are always having in the private clubs they always have them in, what exactly it is that they have been paying for. When the donors ask that question, the operation enters a phase of decay that is not, on the historical record, easily reversed. I do not have to predict this decay from my kitchen table. The lobby's own operating math will predict it for them in the reports they are commissioning this week.

The second specific is that Michigan, alone among the swing states, holds the largest Arab American voting population in the country, and that population, along with the broader Muslim American voting population that has grown across the Midwest over the last two decades, has spent the last twenty months in a specific and unignorable state of moral fury about the direction of American foreign policy on Israel, Gaza, and now Iran. Until Tuesday, the arithmetic of that fury on the November board looked like a loss of enthusiasm at the top of the Democratic ticket that a Republican, Mike Rogers, was going to be able to convert into a narrow statewide win. That arithmetic changed on Tuesday. The Arab American and Muslim American voters of Michigan now have, on the November ballot, a candidate who is one of their own by heritage and by moral commitment, and who is asking for their vote not as an afterthought but as the visible spine of his coalition. Mike Rogers, whom I have read on and studied and whom I do not personally consider a serious strategist, does not have the coalitional discipline or the moral fluency to answer that math. He is going to try. He is going to lose. And Michigan, which was on the general-election map at the top of the Republican column, is going to come off the map. That is not a partisan claim on my part. That is an observation about where the water is now flowing.

The third specific is that the same evening, across several other primaries around the country, insurgent progressive and heterodox candidates outperformed the polling the establishment had prepared for itself, and while I do not want to over-generalize from a single Tuesday, I do want to say what a single Tuesday, when it accumulates with the several Tuesdays before it, means. It means the country is leaning. It has been leaning since the winter, when the war on Iran was launched on Israel's behalf in a room the American voter was not consulted in. It has leaned further with every subsequent operation prosecuted in that room. On Tuesday it leaned by an amount the money in the room could not, this time, correct for. That is where we are.

I said in the small note I have run with these pieces that I do not intend to leave my readers in the wreckage without the other half of the record. I want to keep the promise now, because Tuesday's returns are the other half of the record, in the specific and legible form the record has not been able to give me all summer, and I do not want the promise to arrive silently.

The other half is this. The room I have been writing about, the room that has been co-occupied for a generation by the chief executive of a foreign electorate and that arranged the ordnance for last week's strikes on Iranian soil, is not an eternal room. It is a set of arrangements. The arrangements are subject to arithmetic. On Tuesday, the arithmetic returned an answer, in the specific and unimpeachable form of a primary victory in a swing state, that says the room's leverage over the American electorate has begun to weaken. The weakening is not complete. It is not going to be complete in one cycle. But the weakening has begun. It has begun where it has to begin, which is in the primary electorates that supply the members of Congress the room requires for its votes. The room's members are, in Massie's case, being taken out for defiance. And now the room's approved alternatives are, in Stevens' case, being taken out for compliance. Both of those things are happening at once. When both of those things are happening at once, you are in a period of political realignment, and you know a period of political realignment when you are inside one, because the money in the room stops being able to price the outcome.

I want to say a word about hope, because the whole point of what I am trying to do in these pieces, especially in the new rhythm you and I are working out together, is to make sure hope arrives at the same volume as the loss. I do not want to leave you thinking that Tuesday is the end of the story. It is not the end of the story. Mike Rogers will run a hard general. AIPAC will spend against El-Sayed again in November, and the number this time will be larger than the number they lost with. The wars we are prosecuting on Israel's behalf will not stop because of a Democratic primary in one state, and the families we are killing on behalf of another country's foreign policy will not be un-killed because Michigan voted the way Michigan voted on Tuesday, and I do not want either you or me to make the mistake of thinking that a single result is a single answer. What I want you to see is what a single result of this size, in this state, against this money, on this day, means about what remains possible in a Republic that has not yet forgotten how to be a Republic. It is possible. That is the whole of the sentence I am asking you to carry into the rest of your week. It is possible. The room can be dismantled. The arrangement can be reversed. The freshman class of the next Congress, which I told you in the last piece would contain more members willing to name what they see than the current class does, is going to contain them. Some of them are already running. Some of them will win. That is not sentiment. That is Tuesday's proof.

I want to close with what I owe my children, because I write these pieces for them as much as for anyone else. What Tuesday gave them, and what I owe them the honesty of telling them clearly, is a country that is still capable of correcting itself in the ordinary democratic ways it was designed to correct itself. That is a bigger inheritance than any dollar figure I could hand them privately. It is the inheritance of a Republic that works, imperfectly and slowly and with the specific interruptions of political fury that are the price a serious country pays for continuing to be one. I am handing my children that inheritance this morning with a small increment of confidence I did not have last week. I owe Tuesday's voters in Michigan the acknowledgment that they, and not I, produced the increment. I want to thank them. I want to congratulate Abdul El-Sayed by name. I want to say plainly that his victory belongs to a coalition that has been building for a decade in Michigan under an American press that mostly declined to notice it was building, and that the same coalition is building, quietly and away from the American press, in several other states this cycle, and that the returns from those states are coming.

The room just lost one. It is going to lose more.

I intend to keep writing.
### The Currency We Forfeited
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-currency-we-forfeited-1/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:56.000Z
Three Septembers ago, before mBridge had cleared its first sixty billion dollars and before the President of the United States had signed an order forbidding the federal government from so much as studying a sovereign digital dollar, I wrote that the political convulsions then crossing the African continent looked, to my eye, like the opening of a window. The regime changes in Niger and in Gabon, the cracking of old French commercial arrangements, the visible exhaustion of the developmental promises that the West had been making for two generations without keeping; all of it, taken together, struck me as the conditions under which something new could be built. I argued in that 2023 piece that "it is my opinion that these shifts create a tremendous opportunity to allow the emergence of digital currencies as a disruptive force," and I noted what I still believe to be the truer indictment, that "our generalized western conception of the needs and wants of countries in Africa has crashed violently against the reality that our American conception of 'democracy' on its face is incredibly hypocritical and disconnected from the reality." That window has not closed. Other people have walked through it.

The proof of concept is no longer hypothetical. mBridge, the Multiple CBDC Bridge, is now a five-central-bank settlement platform jointly developed by the People's Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, and the Saudi Central Bank, which graduated from observer to full participant in June of 2024\. As of the most recent reliable accounting, the platform has cleared roughly sixty-nine billion dollars in cross-border settlement value, and the e-CNY accounts for over ninety-five percent of that volume. More than thirty other central banks watch from the observer benches; among them sit the South African Reserve Bank, the Central Bank of Egypt, the Bank of Mauritius, and the Bank of Namibia. None of those four are full participants. They are watching, taking notes, learning the wiring of a system whose operational rails are being laid by Beijing. In October of 2024, the Bank for International Settlements, which had midwifed the project for four years, formally withdrew, with its general manager Agustín Carstens explaining in a Madrid speech that the platform had "graduated" and could now be carried by its members on their own. Whatever one wishes to make of that exit, the technical question has been answered: the infrastructure works, the value moves, the books reconcile. What is in dispute is who builds the next one, and what it will be backed by, and what it will mean for the global ordering of money.

On the twenty-third of January, 2025, the President of the United States signed Executive Order 14178, titled "Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology." Its Section 5(a) is, in plain English, a withdrawal from the field: it prohibits federal agencies "from undertaking any action to establish, issue, or promote CBDCs within the jurisdiction of the United States or abroad," and it revokes, in the same document, the prior Biden executive order on digital assets. The order's policy framing goes further, asserting an intention to prohibit not just the establishment but the circulation and use of such instruments domestically. One can argue, and I will: the privately issued dollar stablecoin is a different and in many ways consistent American choice, and the trillions now settling on it should not be dismissed. But anchoring private dollar liquidity is not the same thing as being the institutional partner that helps a sovereign system in the global south stand up its own rails. We have, deliberately and on the record, declined that role.

The country that has not declined it is China. And here is the place where the honest conservative reader must hold two truths at once. The Chinese model, executed through mBridge and the e-CNY and the older infrastructure of the Belt and Road, is in its own way extractive; the ninety-five-percent share of settlement volume the digital yuan now carries through that platform is not the description of a partnership of equals, it is the description of a hub-and-spoke. China is not better than we were. China is simply present, and we are not. The instinct to dismiss mBridge as a junior project that will collapse under sanctions pressure is the same complacency that told us, year after year, that SWIFT and the dollar clearing system were unkillable as instruments of American leverage rather than of American restraint. The patient construction of an alternative is what the next decade will be.

Now to the part that the diagnostic requires us to name. The African continent holds the physical inputs of the rest of the world's twenty-first century. The Democratic Republic of the Congo controls roughly half of the world's identified cobalt reserves and produces something closer to three-quarters of the global supply that the battery industry depends upon. South Africa holds, on the most recent United States Geological Survey accounting, in the neighborhood of eighty-three percent of the world's platinum-group metal reserves, the metals on which catalytic converters and certain classes of semiconductor and clean-energy manufacturing turn. Guinea sits on roughly a quarter of the world's bauxite reserves, the front end of every aluminum smelter on the planet. Namibia is the second-largest holder of identified uranium reserves on earth, with Niger sitting in the top tier alongside it. Libya leads the continent in proved oil reserves, with Nigeria second and Algeria third; Nigeria leads in proved natural gas, with Algeria close behind. Zimbabwe and Mali now carry the audited lithium reserves that the energy transition cannot proceed without, and the DRC, beyond its cobalt, sits on copper reserves placing it in the top five globally. These are not promises. They are bookings, in the public ledgers of agencies we ourselves run.

A digital currency tokenized against an audited, basket-weighted portfolio of those reserves, settled on rails the participating governments themselves operate, would, by any honest definition of soundness, be a harder currency than a fiat instrument backed by the full faith and credit of a sovereign that carries thirty-six trillion dollars in obligations and that has spent the better part of two decades teaching the rest of the world to fear the weaponization of its clearing system. That is the headline claim of this piece, and I will defend it: the money that could be built beneath the African continent could rival or exceed the dollar in soundness. Not, yet, in liquidity. Not, yet, in network effects. But in the property that sits at the philosophical center of what makes money trustworthy, which is convertibility into something the world cannot wish into being. The materials are there. The proof of concept is there. The political will, in scattered places, is there. What is not there, and what we have actively chosen will not be there, is an American partner who is interested in helping build it. We have offered to be the sheriff. We have not offered to be the teacher.

This is the place where the historical pattern must be spoken of without flinching. The sovereigns that have, in living memory, attempted to displace the dollar in the pricing of commodities or in the settlement of cross-border trade have not enjoyed peaceful outcomes. Muammar Gaddafi, in his year as chair of the African Union, championed the project of a single African currency, and the most widely circulated account of his subsequent fate, the April 2011 memorandum from Sidney Blumenthal to Hillary Clinton released by WikiLeaks as document C05779612, reports that Gaddafi's government held 143 tons of gold and a comparable quantity of silver, that these reserves "were intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar," and that French intelligence regarded the project as one of President Nicolas Sarkozy's motivations for the intervention. That memorandum was compiled through former intelligence channels and was treated skeptically by some State Department staff; readers should weight it as intelligence hearsay rather than as confirmed French policy. The undisputed facts, however, are that Gaddafi advanced the continental-currency idea publicly, that he was killed during a NATO-backed intervention in 2011, and that the Libyan state remains, fifteen years later, a fragmented and contested space. Saddam Hussein priced Iraqi crude in euros from November of 2000 until the American occupation reversed the decision in the summer of 2003\. The Islamic Republic of Iran was cut from the SWIFT messaging system in March of 2012, restored briefly under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in January of 2016, and cut again in November of 2018; Qasem Soleimani was killed by an American drone strike at Baghdad International Airport on the third of January, 2020\. The Maduro government of Venezuela launched the Petro on the twentieth of February, 2018, and President Trump signed an executive order forbidding American transaction in it twenty-seven days later; the instrument was eventually wound up in January of 2024, defeated as much by its own incompetence as by Washington, but the message was not lost on anyone who was watching. The pattern is not subtle. It is also not a reason for the African continent to stand still. It is a reason to build away from the line of sight of the apparatus that has historically enforced the dollar's monopoly, which is precisely what is now happening, and it is part of the explanation for the running room China has been given.

The conservative reading of this reckoning is the one I am closing on. The United States lost the role of partner because it would not surrender the role of cop. China is content to be the partner because the partner role is the role that compounds. The African continent, which has both the physical resources and now, finally, the technical demonstration that a sovereign settlement system is achievable, will choose what it chooses, and it does not need our permission. I do not need to propose a comeback plan, because any honest plan would require an institutional candor about the limits of American power that the present Washington consensus is incapable of producing. My job here is to name what has been forfeited. We had the chance to be technical assistance, regulatory mentor, market opener, the conduit that helped a friend build something the friend, not the donor, would ultimately own. We chose, instead, to remain the entity that the rest of the world is now constructing sovereign systems in order to bypass. That choice has consequences. The consequences are arriving on the books of a settlement platform that does not need our permission, denominated in a currency that does not bear our face, collateralized against minerals that are not in our ground.

The meter is running.

---

**Related reading**

- [Inflation Is a Choice: Notes on a Chairman's First Test](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-is-a-choice-notes-on-a-chairman-s-first-test/)
- [Managing Inflation and Consumer Confidence](https://www.earlogarro.com/managing-inflation-and-consumer-confidence/)
- [Inflation: The Externality of Generous Fiscal Policies](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-the-externality-of-generous-fiscal-policies/)
- [The Ledger That Will Not Lie](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-ledger-that-will-not-lie/)
### For the Sake of All Our Sons
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/for-the-sake-of-all-our-sons/
Last updated: 2026-07-12T19:52:14.000Z
I woke somewhere over the Aleutians, in the dark of a wide-body 787 cabin that had been dimmed hours before, in the small blue island of my own reading light, with the sound of the engines steady and the sound of a phone against the tray table more insistent than it should have been. I looked at the reflection of my own face in the oval of the window, and past my reflection at the darkness that had no country in it, and I picked up the phone. There was a small stack of notifications from the hours I had been asleep, and I opened the first one, and the first one was a post on X saying that Lindsey Graham was dead.

I want to tell you what happened after that, because it is the thing I have to say and cannot say lightly.

I was happy.

I mean, I felt happiness. Before I had thought about it, before I had asked the questions a man asks himself about a report on X in the middle of the night, before I had reminded myself that I had been raised by a woman who would have opened the Book at that hour to a specific verse about the mercy owed to the dead, before any of that, I felt what a person feels when a weight has come off. Not the weight of the news itself. The weight of the man in the news. He had been, for some time, one of the specific weights I did not know I was carrying, and I discovered that I had been carrying it only in the moment it was gone.

I would like to tell you that shame put a hand on the feeling and moved it out of the room. It did not. I sat with the shame and I sat with the feeling and the two of them sat with me in seat 9L of the American Airlines nonstop, and the song in my headphones, *Firm Friends* by Drake, kept looping into the space where a psalm would have been, and by the time we had crossed the coast the aircraft was steady on the descent line and the feeling was still there, honest and quiet and mine.

That is the sentence I will not run from. I hated how genuinely happy I was, and I could not make myself stop.

There is an old ask that a country makes of its citizens on days when men like this die. The ask is that the citizens respect the dead. I was raised to accept that ask without argument, and I have accepted it, for most of my adult life, without stopping to interrogate it. Somewhere over the Pacific, at some altitude I could not name from inside a dimmed cabin, I found myself unwilling to accept it in this case. The reason came into focus with the same quiet clarity as the happiness had. One is only expected to respect the dead if the dead respected the living. Lindsey Graham did not. That is not a claim about death, which is common to us and merits its own kind of hush. It is a claim about the arithmetic of respect, which is not common at all, and which has to be earned in the specific ledger of what a man did with the years he was given. The country wants to collect a respect from me it has not paid on his behalf. I am not going to pay it.

I want to be careful about what did this to me, because I do not want to blame one senator for the work of a country. The country did the work. The senator was a small clarifying event inside a longer accumulation. Maybe it started earlier than any of the recent politics. Maybe it was sitting in the passenger seat of a car in the parking lot of the VA hospital in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, at eight or nine years old, watching the door and waiting for my father to come out of an appointment I did not understand and would not learn to name until years later. Maybe it was the phone calls in the fall of 1990, when he told me from the other end of a receiver that he might have to go fight the Gulf War, and that it would be, in his own word, good. Maybe it was the afternoon in 1997 when he took his own life after a career in this country's Army had, by his own accounting, closed him off from any understanding of what actually mattered, and the man whose mind had been shaped by war decided he had no further use for what was not war. It was also thirty years of watching the men who wrote the wars send other men's sons to fight them, and specifically Black men's sons, and specifically the sons whose fathers had spent their working lives explaining to those sons why they should love a country that would eat them. It was watching one careful representative after another get pushed out of the room for saying what any honest reader of the Constitution would say aloud. It was watching a set of files that were said to contain the names of the powerful get slow-walked and reclassified until they were, in the practical sense, gone. It was watching another country's prime minister be handed the microphone in a joint session of Congress in June and use it to sell my sons a war that was not theirs. It was watching the rails of the century's new financial architecture get laid down in places I could not name at a table my country was not invited to sit at, and hearing my own government explain to me, patiently, that this was somehow good. It was, in the end, all of it. It was thirty years of the country doing its work on the boy I had been, and the boy I had been was not, on Sunday morning at forty thousand feet, in seat 9L. Some other man was.

That was the man Lindsey Graham had helped make.

Now let me say the thing about him plainly, because plainness is what I owe the moment.

He voted for Iraq and he never took it back. He wanted Libya, and he wanted Syria, and by 2010 he was already writing the case for a war with Iran, which finally came in the February of this year, and which he was on television inside the hour selling. About that war he had said, in a phrase he did not have the wit to be embarrassed by, that America was going to make a tonne of money off of it. About the campaign in Gaza he had said that we should level the place. He was in Kyiv on the Friday before he died, standing beside another president, selling another war to another camera, on his tenth pilgrimage to a country whose ordinary people he could not have named. He was, on the record, in a 1998 interview he never retracted, not a combat soldier. He said, honestly, I am not a war hero, and never said I was. I am willing to grant him the honesty of that one sentence. What I am not willing to grant him is what he did with the shelter it gave him. He built a career inside a lawyer's office and used it to buy passage for other men's sons into the countries he himself never had to enter. He took, over his time in the Senate, more than a million dollars from the political action committees organized around another country's foreign policy. The Republican Jewish Coalition was, by the accounting of OpenSecrets, his single largest sponsor. Those donations bought votes. Those votes bought wars. Those wars bought coffins. Those coffins came home to families whose names have never appeared on any donor list and whose grief has never crossed the threshold of any conference call.

The song looped. The aircraft dropped through some transition altitude and I felt the small pressure in my ears that means the ground is coming.

I have two Black sons. I do not think about their futures as separate from the futures of the men who decide which wars they will be asked to fight. I cannot. No father of Black boys in this country can, and any father of Black boys who tells you otherwise is either lying to you or lying to himself. The men who sit in the chairs Lindsey Graham sat in do not think about my sons at all. Or, when they do, they think about them the way a spreadsheet thinks about a line item, the way a warehouse thinks about inventory, the way an actuary thinks about the acceptable rate at which the merchandise breaks. That is not an accusation. That is a description. Any father of Black boys who has read the actual language of an actual defense authorization has read that description, and understood it, and put the paper down. Lindsey Graham was one of the men who wrote that language. He is not, this Sunday morning, one of the men writing it any longer, because he is not. I am glad of that. I am glad of it in the specific way a father is glad of anything that puts him and his sons one small step further from the machine that has been trying to eat them for two hundred and fifty years. I will not dress the gladness up in anything else. It does not need dressing.

I know what the country will say this week. There will be the obituaries and the tributes and the anchors that reach for the word titan, and the presidents who release statements as though they had loved him, and the colleagues who go to the microphone and remember him with the particular tenderness the powerful reserve for their own dead. Underneath all of it will be the ask I have already refused. He did not respect the living. He does not qualify for the hush the country wants me to keep. Let them speak. I have nothing to add to any of it. The boy I was, the boy raised by a woman who taught me that the mercy owed to the dead is not optional, would have found a way to say a psalm for him by breakfast. That boy is at home. He is not on this plane. He is somewhere in a kitchen I know very well, with a woman in white scrubs who has come in from a shift at the hospital and put her keys on the counter and asked me about my day. The man in this seat is what a country made in the years between that kitchen and this cabin. This is who is writing. I am not going to pretend the boy is at the keyboard, because he is not, and the reason he is not is a public record with your name on it, Senator.

The dead are owed our respect only if they respected the living. He did not. So. Goodbye, and good riddance.

You are off the board this morning. The wars you were selling on Friday will be sold by other men on Tuesday, and I know that, and I am not making the claim that the country is now safe. I am making the smaller and more honest claim that it is, on this one Sunday morning, a little less unsafe. One specific hand has left one specific dial. The dial will be turned by other hands. I know that too. But on the mornings we are given, we take what we are given, and this morning I am given the specific fact that one of the men who spent thirty years wagering my sons against the ambitions of the people who paid him is no longer able to move the wager. I take that. I take it plainly. I take it without apology and without disguise and without the polite fictions the country asks of me on days like this, because if I cannot say this plainly to my sons when they are old enough to read it, then everything I have been writing all summer has been a lie.

I have been thinking about the life my father might have had if the country he served had asked something of him other than the willingness to kill or die on its behalf. He had a mind with more room in it than the desert had room for. He had hands that could have built, or healed, or kept the books of a business he might have owned, or held a house through the long years a house needs holding, or held a boy in the small evenings that were not war and were not preparation for war. The country asked him for the smallest and most reducing use of himself, and it kept asking until he did not know what a man was for outside the shape of what it had asked. I do not know if he would still be alive if it had asked something else of him. I know that the distance between the man he was and the man the country made out of him killed him.

I have two Black sons. The work I owe them, the work I have been trying to name for years and now can, is to know my own purpose clearly enough that neither the country nor its wars nor the men who write them can talk me out of it, and to leave my sons a purpose of their own so specific that the same men cannot write theirs for them either. A father who does not know his purpose leaves his sons open to whoever will tell them what theirs is supposed to be. I do not want that for my sons. My purpose is not to fight the country's wars. It is not to explain them. It is to stand between the machinery and my children and to build inside my house a way of being that does not need the country's permission to be worth something. That is what I have to give them. That is what I want them to give theirs.

The flight attendant has just asked me to stow my tray table and put my electronic devices away. Which means that this letter has to come to an end. I am glad to end it here.

For the sake of all our sons.
### The Country I Cannot Outrun
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-country-i-cannot-outrun/
Last updated: 2026-07-09T22:15:43.000Z
I was standing in the customs line at Haneda when the news reached me. That is the truth of it, and there is no more honest way to begin. I had come to Tokyo on business with the United States Department of War, which is what our Department of Defense has been called since the President signed the order restoring the older name last year, and I had come at the far end of a Fourth of July weekend that was already, before I had boarded the plane, a weekend of small partings. I had told my oldest son to keep an eye on the company while I was gone, and I had put my youngest on a plane to Florida so he could fish with his friends for a few days before he starts high school in Connecticut. I had signed off on two boys with one signature each and turned toward the Pacific. I had thought, God help me, that I was leaving the country behind for a week. What I learned in that customs line, and what any Black man of a certain age already knows, is that the country does not permit that arrangement. There are parts of the United States that reach for you no matter how many time zones you have put between yourself and your kitchen table. I was oceans from home, and the country was already asking me to pay attention.

I am writing these sentences from a small Airbnb apartment somewhere in Tokyo, at a table that is not mine, in a room with photographs on the walls of people I do not know but whom I respect, because they have opened their home to me. That is a small kindness. It is on my mind this week.

The news that reached me was about a boy named Nolan Xavier Wells. He was eighteen. He was from Ocean Springs, Mississippi. He had graduated from Ocean Springs High School the previous spring, where he had been a multi-sport athlete, and he had signed on to play football, at wide receiver, for Southwest Mississippi Community College. On the afternoon of the Fourth of July, he had left a private dock with a group of friends, headed to Horn Island for the holiday, which is a barrier island about ten miles off the Gulf coast and is by all accounts a beautiful place to spend a summer day. He did not come home. His mother, Christine Wonsley, called the Jackson County Sheriff's Office around midnight to report that her son had not returned. On the morning of Monday, July 6, a United States Park Service ranger found a body in the water just off the northwestern tip of Horn Island, and the Jackson County coroner, Bruce Lynd, later confirmed through dental records that the body was Nolan. The cause and manner of death have not been released. Investigators told ABC News that they suspect drowning and that they do not, at this time, see evidence of foul play. The family, unwilling to wait weeks for the state's answers, has retained the civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who has publicly described what he calls an altercation on the boat, characterized as Nolan and someone else yelling at one another, and who has arranged for the boy's body to be flown to Washington, D.C. for an independent autopsy. The Reverend Al Sharpton has joined the family at the microphone. That is the map, as much of it as anyone can honestly draw at this hour.

I have written about Black children being killed before. I have sat at this table, in this chair, with some version of this paragraph in front of me more times than a father should have to, and I am not going to pretend, for the sake of narrative freshness, that the ground is new. It is not. What is different about the Wells case, and what I have been turning over on the long flight and in the long queue, is not the crime, because we do not yet know if there was one. What is different is the country's silence.

The calendar itself is arguing with us, and it has been arguing for a very long time. Frederick Douglass, standing in Rochester on the fifth of July, 1852, delivered a speech in which he asked what to the American slave was the Fourth of July, and he answered his own question in the plainest words a man could find. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine, he told the country in that hall. It is a day that reveals to me, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which I am the constant victim. Nearly four million people in the United States were not free on the Fourth of July in 1852, and Douglass insisted, out loud, that the country's fireworks were premature so long as that arithmetic held. That speech is a hundred and seventy-four years old. Nolan Xavier Wells left an Ocean Springs dock on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the country's declaration of its own liberty, and he did not come home. His mother made her phone call to the sheriff on a night the country was still setting off fireworks. The calendar is arguing with us in a voice that is not new. That the voice is not new is part of the offense.

Let me put the thing plainly, because plainness is what the story requires. If three Black boys had left an Ocean Springs dock on the Fourth of July with one white boy, and if that white boy had come home in a body bag while the three Black boys came home whole, the President of the United States would very likely have given a speech by now. The Attorney General would already be standing at a lectern. Cable networks would be running the eighteen-year-old's yearbook photograph on a chyron every hour, on the hour, for a week. The white boy's high school football coach would be on the morning shows. There would be a task force. There would be a hashtag with the boy's name in the President's own hand. That is not a hypothetical. That is the country we live in, and any American who has watched a summer news cycle since the invention of cable television knows it. The Wells case has not commanded that response. NPR has covered it. ABC News has covered it. NBC affiliates on the Gulf Coast have covered it. Rolling Stone has covered it. Ebony has covered it. Hot 97 has covered it. The Mississippi Free Press has covered it, and CNN, and Newsweek, and Forbes. The press, in the modest and specific sense, is not ignoring Nolan Xavier Wells. But the presidency is, and the cable networks are not treating this as the week's American story, and the difference between what happens to a country when a Black boy does not come home and what happens to a country when a white boy does not come home is not a paranoid observation. It is a description. I am not asking anyone to invent an outrage they do not feel. I am asking anyone reading this to notice which outrages the country prefers, and to notice which ones it does not.

I want to be careful here, because I owe the Wells family the discipline of not overclaiming what happened on that boat. I do not know what killed Nolan. Neither, at this hour, does the state of Mississippi, and neither does Ben Crump. But that is not, tonight, the question that keeps me at the desk. My concern in this piece is not what happened to Nolan Wells. My concern is what the country has failed to do about the fact that something happened. A child is dead. A mother is calling for answers. That combination of facts, in a country that still remembered how to be a country, would be enough. It would not require a diagnosis. It would not require a task force. It would not require the intervention of Ben Crump. It would only require the ordinary human recognition that a dead child is somebody's child, and that when a child does not come home, the country is supposed to help the family carry the weight of it. That recognition is being withheld from the Wells family, and the withholding is not accidental. It is the country deciding, in real time, which sons it will grieve for and which sons it will not. The question of what killed Nolan is a question we will get to when we get to it. The question I want to sit with, this week, from Tokyo, is the one the country is not asking on Nolan's behalf. How does a country hear the name of an eighteen-year-old who did not come home from a Fourth of July boat trip, and not, for a moment, stop what it is doing and stand next to his mother?

I am writing this as a father. That is not a rhetorical device. I have a fourteen-year-old boy in Florida this week, at a dock with his friends, and I honestly do not know if he has been on a boat yet by the time you read this, and I would like to tell you that I am not thinking about that as I write these sentences, and I would be lying if I did. That is the weight of the country I cannot outrun. I put my son on a plane the same week Christine Wonsley put in a call at midnight, and the difference between our two nights, and the difference between what I am owed as a father and what she is owed as a mother, is not supposed to be a function of what our sons look like. It is, however. Anyone who denies it is not talking about the same country I am talking about.

There is a temptation, in a piece like this, to talk about the family as though they were a symbol. They are not a symbol. Christine Wonsley is a mother. Nolan Xavier Wells was her son. He was eighteen years old, six foot one, a hundred and eighty-five pounds. His college teammates have called him a leader. His high school has called him beloved. The country he lived in owes his mother the truth about what happened on that boat, and it owes her that truth on her schedule, not on the schedule of a state office that will get to the autopsy in a few weeks, and not on the schedule of a national press corps that has not yet decided this story is the story of the summer. That is the country's failure, and if we love this country, and I do, we name its failures out loud so it can hear us.

I will land at home in a few days. I will pick up my youngest at the airport when his fishing trip is over. I will walk into my office and shake my oldest son's hand and thank him for holding the line while I was gone. I will sit down at the kitchen table where I write these pieces. And I will remember, because I owe the Wells family this and I owe my own sons this, that the presidency of the United States can find its voice for the American boys it wishes to speak for and can lose its voice for the American boys it does not. That is not a fact of nature. It is a choice, made every summer, in every administration, by men who could choose otherwise. Nolan Xavier Wells was an American boy. He deserved the speech we are still waiting for. So does his mother.
### The Country That Gave and the Country That Took
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-country-that-gave-and-the-country-that-took/
Last updated: 2026-07-04T23:48:03.000Z
The country turns two hundred and fifty years old today. That is not a small number. Most countries do not last two hundred and fifty years, and the ones that do are the ones that were willing to argue with themselves in the open, out loud, at the kitchen table, in the courthouse, and on the anniversary of their own founding. So I want to argue with mine today, in the way arguments with family are offered on birthdays, which is to say with the door still open and the coat still on the rack.

I owe the country a lot. I was born in the United States Virgin Islands. I was educated in this country. I built a company in this country, and that company employs people on more than one continent. I am a father in this country. None of the sentences in that paragraph describe the experience of a man for whom the American Dream is a fiction. The Dream is not a fiction to me. It is a set of facts on the ground. It is my payroll. It is my passport. It is homework at the kitchen table on a school night. I have to state that first, and I have to state it cleanly, because everything else I am going to say has to be heard in the light of that statement and not against it.

I owe the country something else, too. The attorney I hired to defend me against federal charges, Andrew Crumbie, was cooperating with the government in the construction of those very charges. I sat in a federal courtroom while twelve people I had never met considered the shape of my family's next years. I went to prison. And I came home. The same country that gave me the education and the runway to build a business is the country that took me from my family for reasons I do not accept and will not pretend to accept on the day this country celebrates itself. Both of those sentences are true. Both belong on the page today. The dishonor would be to pick one and forget the other, and this country did not get to two hundred and fifty by picking one and forgetting the other. It got here by being willing, in its better hours, to look at both.

I want to talk about what the return required, because the return is the part people do not see. A man comes out of a federal facility with the clothes on his back and a set of conditions the world attaches to him, and the question is not whether he wants to build. The question is whether the country he is walking back into still has, inside it, the working parts that let a man like him build. That is what the American Dream actually is. It is not a slogan. It is a set of institutions. It is private property that the government respects. It is contracts that the courts will enforce even when the person you signed with is more powerful than you. It is a credit system that will price your risk and give you a shot. It is a currency the rest of the world will still take at par. It is a legal system that permits you to work after your sentence has been served instead of writing you out of the economy forever. And it is, underneath all of that, a culture that has not become so cynical it will refuse to hire you, sit across from you, sell to you, or trust you.

Those are the vital signs of the patient. I know them because I checked each one on the way back into the room. Every one of them held long enough for me to build. That is why the Dream is not dead for me. If it were dead, I would not have a company. I would not have employees in more than one country. I would not have any of what I have. I know what the Dream is because I used it to come home.

And I know something else, which is that the vital signs are weakening. This is where the birthday argument gets harder to have, and where I want to be careful. I am not writing to complain. I am writing to notice. Over the last several months I have been writing about what I have been watching. I have written about lobbies that have learned how to capture our primaries, and about members of Congress removed for the crime of voting their own conscience. I have written about the choice this country made, in a single executive order, to stop building a public digital dollar while the rest of the world kept building settlement rails without us. I have written about a Congress that will not investigate the killing of its own sailors, and about a coalition that cannot hold, and about a doctrine on self-defense with two different doors depending on who is standing at them. I am not going to name every one of those pieces here. This is not a table of contents. But if you have been reading me, you already know the through-line, and if you have not, you will feel it now. Every one of those pieces is the same piece. The story is that the conditions that make the Dream possible, the institutional conditions, are being hollowed out by a political class that has forgotten what a Republic is for.

A Republic is not for cameras. A Republic is not for its own perpetuation. A Republic is for the ordinary citizen who has to be able to say what he thinks, sign what he signs, save what he earns, and hand what he built to his children. When the currency is punished for being saved, when the primary is decided by a lobby before the voter shows up, when a member is punished for reading the Constitution honestly, when a killing of sailors is met with a shrug, when a settlement rail is built without us because we could not decide whether to be present, those are not separate stories. Those are the same story. That is the chart at the foot of the bed. That is the reading you take when you stop by the room and check on the patient.

I want to speak, for a paragraph, to my family. On the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the country that has given me both the best and the worst of what it does, I have been thinking about what I am trying to leave them. It is not a country of grievance. I am not asking my family to inherit a grievance, because a grievance is a small inheritance and I do not have the patience to hand my family anything small. It is also not a country of denial. I am not asking my family to inherit a fable. What I am trying to leave them is a country that argues with itself out loud, that pays its debts in a currency the world will still take, that lets a man who has served his time build again, that decides its primaries in front of its own voters and not on behalf of anyone else's foreign policy, that treats the truth as an obligation rather than an inconvenience. If I leave them that country, I will have done what a father is supposed to do. If I do not, no amount of what I have built will have been enough.

I am not going to preach the choice. I have never had much patience for people who preach choices they have not had to make themselves. I will only say what I know, which is what I saw when I walked out of the room and back into this country. The Dream is alive. I am proof. The Dream is on life support. My own writing over these last months is the chart. The birthday is today. The question, on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the country that both gave to me and took from me, is whether the country wants the patient to walk out of the room, or whether it is content to let the machines keep the readings steady while the muscles atrophy underneath.

I want the patient to walk out of the room. My business wants the patient to walk out of the room. My family wants the patient to walk out of the room, whether they know it yet or not. So I will love this country the way I have learned to love the people I love, which is with my eyes open, my hand on the pulse, and my mouth willing to say the thing that needs to be said on the day it needs to be said. Two hundred and fifty years is a real number. It is worth arguing over. It is worth staying for. It is, if we can be honest with each other for one afternoon, still worth building for.
### The Men Who Knew Better
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-men-who-knew-better/
Last updated: 2026-06-29T12:04:35.000Z
There is a particular kind of grief reserved for the moment a man who knew better decides, in full view of the country, to pretend he did not. It is not the grief of the fool, who never understood. It is the grief of watching understanding itself bend, quietly, under the weight of a title and a flag and the warm approval of powerful rooms.

Consider Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon's chief of policy, who spent the better part of two decades teaching anyone who would listen that the Middle East was, in his own words, "relatively unimportant," that the true contest of the century was with China, and that America had bled itself white in deserts that gave nothing back. He was right. That is the part we must not forget. He was right, and then a war came, and he stood before the Senate and called it America First, and explained that the campaign against Iran's missiles and its navy and its nuclear ambition was, after all, exactly what peace through strength required.

I do not doubt his sincerity. I doubt something worse: his memory.

For we were told this would be brief. We were told it would be surgical, that the Islamabad Memorandum signed in June by Vice President JD Vance and the President and the Iranian president would close the wound, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, let the oil run, and send the boys home. And then, on the twenty-fifth of that same June, an Iranian drone found a cargo ship leaving the very strait we were promised was open, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, without apparent irony, that there would be no peace "as long as there are non-state actors operating within the boundaries and borders of sovereign countries and being funded by Iran."

Which is to say: the peace is signed, and the firing continues. This is not a contradiction the men in charge stumbled into. It is the oldest arrangement in the republic's foreign account, the one where the announcement of victory and the persistence of war are permitted to occupy the same week, the same podium, the same mouth.

A conservative is supposed to count. He is supposed to know that nothing the government sells as cheap stays cheap, that the dollar spent abroad is a dollar taken from a family at home, that the son sent to guard a shipping lane is a son who is not at his father's table. The whole moral architecture of restraint rests on a single unfashionable virtue: the courage to remember what you said before the cameras came.

Colby remembered for twenty years. Then he forgot in an afternoon. The tragedy is not that hawks are hawks. The tragedy is that the one man positioned to say no said yes, and dressed the yes in the language of the no.

We should watch what the oil does. We should watch the strait. And we should remember, longer than a news cycle, who told us it was over.
### The Arithmetic of Versailles
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-arithmetic-of-versailles/
Last updated: 2026-06-22T12:03:44.000Z
There is a particular American habit, older than any of us and more durable than our memory, of beginning a thing we do not intend to finish and calling the beginning a victory. We did it again this winter. On the twenty-eighth of February, under the name Operation Epic Fury, the United States and Israel opened the largest air campaign the region had seen since the buildings of Baghdad came down in 2003, and a country that had spent the cold months watching the Iranian regime gun down its own people in the streets was told that the fury would be epic, and brief, and ours.

It was epic. Whether it was brief depends on who is counting, and on what. Fifteen American servicemen are dead. More than three thousand Iranians are dead, the regime's soldiers and the regime's victims lowered into the same ground, the difference between them lost to the altitude from which we chose to look. Two thousand more lie in Lebanon, where the war we started found the war we had forgotten. Moody's Analytics, which has no stake in the poetry of the thing, puts the cost to American consumers and taxpayers at one hundred thirty-two billion dollars, and counting. That phrase, and counting, is the whole of what I mean to say.

For now there is a paper. On the seventeenth of June, in the Palace of Versailles of all the rooms on earth, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum of understanding, and President Masoud Pezeshkian signed his copy in Tehran, and the men who write the headlines called it peace. Read it. It is a sixty-day ceasefire and a promise to keep talking. The question the bombs were dropped to answer, whether Iran enriches uranium and how much and who shall decide, is precisely the question the paper leaves unanswered. It is deferred. It is, in the language of diplomats, an outstanding issue. The strait reopens, the President wrote on Truth Social, upon the signing of the Deal on Friday, for purposes of mine removal. We laid the mines. We will remove the mines. We will call the removal a triumph.

I am no pacifist, and I will not pretend the men in Tehran are anything other than what they are. A regime that machine-guns its own children in January has forfeited my sympathy entirely. But a conservative is meant to be the one who reads the bill before he signs it, who knows the state is never so dangerous as when it is certain and cheap and quick, who remembers that the dead do not rise again when the markets calm and the oil flows and the cable hosts move on. Versailles is a fitting room for this. The last men to sign a glorious peace beneath that ceiling bought the next war with it, and handed the receipt to their children.

Count the cost. Count it honestly. Then tell me what we bought.
### The Peace That Some Cannot Afford: An Opinion
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-peace-that-some-cannot-afford-an-opinion/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:41:01.000Z
*What follows is my opinion, and mine alone.*

A man can tell a great deal about a country by watching what frightens it, and this week I have been watching who flinches at the rumor of peace. On Sunday the President of the United States told Benjamin Netanyahu that an agreement with Iran might be signed within days, and the word went out as good news, the way the end of any war is supposed to be good news. Yet I notice that not everyone in this story wants the thing they claim to be fighting for. I notice that some men prosper in the fire and would not know what to do with the morning after.

Consider what Mr. Netanyahu actually says, not what we wish he said. Even as Washington reaches for a deal, he insists that Israel will retain its freedom of action, which is a careful phrase, a diplomat's phrase, meaning the right to strike when and where he chooses regardless of what any American signs. His government bombed Beirut and drew a rebuke from the very President now selling the peace. And inside his cabinet sit men like Bezalel Smotrich, who has stood before maps of a greater Israel and spoken plainly of expansion, of a Palestinian state strangled in the cradle. These are not my inventions. They are public acts and public words, and a citizen is permitted to read them.

Here is my opinion, offered without apology. A stable Iran, reintegrated and solvent, is of no use to a faction whose ambitions require its neighbors weak, divided, and afraid. A nation at war is a nation that cannot organize against you. So the peace that an American mother prays for, the one that brings her son home and lets the oil flow and lets the region breathe, is not the peace that every ally desires. Their interests and ours diverge, and the divergence is not a secret. It is written in their votes and their maps.

We have been here before, we Americans, financing wars sold to us as brief and cheap, wars that were going to pay for themselves, wars that left us poorer and our word weaker. We are a generous people and an easily flattered one, and flattery is the oldest instrument for spending another man's blood and treasure. The question a free people must ask, the question I am asking, is simple and unwelcome: whose peace is being negotiated, and whose is being quietly undone?

I do not know how this ends. But James Baldwin gave us the rule for a moment like this one, and it has lost none of its edge: "I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do." When the powerful announce peace with one hand and reserve their freedom of action with the other, a free people is obliged to believe the deed and not the declaration. I am watching what is done. I would ask you to watch it too.

---

**Related reading**

- [The Price of Other People's Wars](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-price-of-other-people-s-wars/)
- [The Wages of Another Man's War](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-wages-of-another-man-s-war/)
- [The Promise of Easy Wars](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-promise-of-easy-wars/)
### Inflation Is a Choice: Notes on a Chairman's First Test
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-is-a-choice-notes-on-a-chairman-s-first-test/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:54.000Z
There is a kind of lie a country tells itself when it wants something for nothing, and we have been telling it for the better part of two decades. The lie is that money can be conjured without consequence, that a central bank can hold the price of borrowing below the cost of living and call the difference prosperity. In May the lie came due again. The Consumer Price Index rose 4.2 percent over the year, the steepest climb since the spring of 2023, and the dollar in your pocket bought less of everything that sustains a life: the fuel, the rent, the groceries a family carries up the stairs.

Energy did most of the visible damage, up 3.9 percent in a single month and nearly a quarter over the year, the war in the Persian Gulf pressing on every barrel and therefore on every receipt. That part no chairman controls. But the rest, the long erosion, the slow theft that compounds while no one is watching, that is a choice. Kevin Warsh, sworn in this spring as the seventeenth chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much before the Senate that questioned him. Inflation, he told them, is a choice, a duty to price stability the Fed must meet "without excuse or equivocation, argument or anguish." It was the truest sentence a central banker has spoken in years, and next week, on the sixteenth and seventeenth of June, he will be made to live inside it.

He will be made to live inside it because the man who appointed him will not let him forget it. On the seventh of June, President Donald Trump declared that the Fed would be "wrong" to raise rates, and there it is, the oldest temptation in the republic dressed in new clothes: cheapen the cost of money, flatter the markets, let the bill arrive after the next election. Every government that ever debased its coin did so for reasons that felt urgent at the time. The Romans shaved their silver. The Continental Congress printed until the word "Continental" became a synonym for worthless. The temptation does not change; only the names of the men who resist it, or do not.

To resist it is not cruelty. It is the opposite of cruelty. The founder who cannot price a loan, the family whose wages chase a receding cart, the saver watching a lifetime of discipline thinned by a policy he never cast a vote for: these are the people a sound dollar protects. A currency is a promise, and a promise kept is the quiet foundation of every enterprise a free people dares to build.

So the question that hangs over that room next week is not really about a quarter of a percentage point. It is about whether a man will keep his word against the very person who handed him the job. Warsh said inflation is a choice. We are about to learn whose.

---

**Related reading**

- [Managing Inflation and Consumer Confidence](https://www.earlogarro.com/managing-inflation-and-consumer-confidence/)
- [Inflation: The Externality of Generous Fiscal Policies](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-the-externality-of-generous-fiscal-policies/)
- [The Ledger That Will Not Lie](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-ledger-that-will-not-lie/)
- [The Dollar Remembers What We Forget](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-dollar-remembers-what-we-forget/)
### What I Have Tried to Tell You
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/what-i-have-tried-to-tell-you/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T03:30:45.000Z
Tonight I am trying to figure out how to talk to my teenage sons. I have one boy who is fourteen and one boy who is seventeen, and tomorrow they will know about the verdicts that came down this June, eight days apart and two states between them, because the news will reach them through their phones and their friends and the way news always reaches teenagers, which is in fragments before anyone has time to set it in front of them with care. I would like to be the one who sets it in front of them with care. I have been at the kitchen table looking for the sentences, the way fathers of teenage Black sons have looked for the sentences for as long as this country has existed, and the sentences are not coming easily, partly because the sentences never come easily, and partly because of something else I have to tell you about, which is the arithmetic of these two cases, and the way the arithmetic lines up against the bodies asleep on the floor above mine.

Cyrus Carmack-Belton was fourteen. So is my youngest. Karmelo Anthony was seventeen, and Austin Metcalf was seventeen, and so is my oldest. Every boy in this story has the same number of years on him that one of my own sons has tonight. That is the calendar of this country, set down in front of me on this table, and that is what I have been sitting with while my boys have been sleeping upstairs, and that is what I have been trying to find the words for, because tomorrow they are going to come down the stairs and ask me about the news, and I am going to have to look at them and not lie.

I have been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates again, the way I always come back to him when the work of fatherhood feels heavier than my hands. I came back, tonight, to the passage in *Between the World and Me* in which he describes sitting with his fifteen-year-old son Samori on the evening the verdict came down in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Samori watched the news from his father's bed. When the verdict was read, he stood up and told his father he had to go, and he went into his room, and Coates did not, in that moment, feel any need to comfort him. Coates writes that he did not feel the need to comfort his son because he understood, finally, what his son had just understood: that the country was not at war with him, and not at war with his father, but at war with both of them, with all of them, and that no comfort could be offered against a war. *I've got to go.* That is the sentence Samori carried to his bedroom door at fifteen, and that is the sentence I have been hearing in my own head ever since the verdict came in from Texas today. Samori was fifteen. My boys are on either side of fifteen. The conversation Coates had with his son is the conversation I have to have, twice, in different keys, in the morning. I would like to be ready. I am writing this down because writing is the only way I know how to get ready.

On June 1, a jury in Richland County, South Carolina, returned a verdict of not guilty for Chikei Rick Chow, the store owner who, on May 28, 2023, chased a fourteen-year-old boy named Cyrus Carmack-Belton more than a hundred and thirty yards from the Shell station on Parklane Road and shot him through the lower right side of the back, a wound the pathologist described as consistent with someone leaning forward while running, the pathologist concluding in court that Cyrus was not shot from the front. The store's own video had already confirmed that Cyrus had not stolen anything. After eight hours of deliberation, the jury accepted the defense's claim that the shooting was made in defense of the shooter's son. The prosecutor in his closing told the jury that Chow had "chased a kid down, shot him in the back." The jury heard that sentence and returned the verdict it returned.

On June 9, today, a jury in Collin County, Texas, returned a verdict of guilty of murder against Karmelo Anthony, the seventeen-year-old who, on April 2, 2025, at the David Kuykendall Stadium in Frisco, stabbed a seventeen-year-old named Austin Metcalf once in the chest beneath a team tent during a thunderstorm delay at a high school track meet. The court sentenced him to thirty-five years. The jury deliberated for two hours and twenty minutes. Karmelo's lawyers had asked the jury to consider that Austin Metcalf outweighed him by fifty to sixty pounds, that he was sitting with his bag on his lap inside a tent that held some twenty people, that there were words, and a push, and then the knife. The jury rejected the self-defense claim. I am not writing tonight to overrule that jury. I did not sit through the testimony and the cross-examinations, and the discipline of honest thinking forbids me from pretending to know what twelve people heard with their own ears and decided in their own consciences.

What I am doing is putting these two verdicts side by side on the table in front of me, because I cannot let them pass, and because I cannot sit across from my sons in the morning until I have first been willing to sit with this myself tonight.

The doctrine in question is called self-defense. It is the same doctrine in Texas and in South Carolina, and it has been the same doctrine, in some form, for as long as this country has had a law. It asks whether the person who used force reasonably believed they had to, which is to say it asks who the law agrees is reasonable, and that question, in this country, has never been answered in a vacuum, because the law has never been built in one. The man with the gun who chased the child who had not stolen anything was deemed, by a jury, to have acted within the doctrine. The child with the knife who sat in a tent and was confronted and pushed was deemed, by a jury, not to have. What I see, sitting here tonight, is a doctrine with two doors. One opens easily for some hands. The other is bolted shut for others. The doors stand next to each other on the same wall.

There is something I will need to find a way to say about Karmelo that the country will not be in any hurry to say. He was seventeen. My oldest is seventeen. They are not the same boy, and I have to be careful here, because my son did not carry a knife into a track meet and my son did not kill anyone, and Karmelo's parents do not need their grief stretched to cover anybody else's parenting. What is true is that my seventeen-year-old has been to track meets and baseball games and school events that look like the one in Frisco, and that on any given Saturday in any given American spring he is somewhere I cannot see him, in a tent or on a field or in a parking lot, with other boys his age, and that he carries no knife, and that I have raised him not to carry one, and that I have done so partly because I love him and partly because I know what is on the other side of that arithmetic, the arithmetic that says fear plus a weapon equals safety, the arithmetic that has been wrong every time, in every American block and every American school, for as long as anyone has tried it. Karmelo was wrong to carry it. He was wrong to use it. A seventeen-year-old who is wrong is still a child. He will be inside a Texas prison until he is older than I was when I first held my own boys in my arms, and the country that holds him will not hold him with any of the patience I would have wanted, for any child, in any cell. The country that knows his name today will not remember it in five years. I will. And, by the time my sons are men, so will they.

I know something of what is happening tonight in Karmelo Anthony's mother's house, because I have sat in a federal courtroom with the weight of a verdict's possibility on my own shoulders, and I learned, in that chair, what every defendant eventually learns. The verdict is never only about the defendant. When I sat at that table, I thought about my sons more than I thought about myself, and I thought about them with a clarity I had rarely had before, because there is no clearer light than the light that comes when you understand that the next twelve people to walk into the room are going to write a sentence on your children's lives whether you have prepared them for it or not. My circumstances were not Karmelo's, and his are not mine. The lesson is the lesson every father in that posture is forced to learn: the sentence is sometimes served by the body in the cell, and the sentence is always served by the children waiting at home. I knew that before the verdict came in, and the knowing did not protect me from anything, and it would not have protected my sons either. The only thing the knowing did was teach me what the work was going to be, after, regardless. The work, which is the only inheritance I have to give them, is to make sure they know that whatever the country writes on them, I am still the one who gets to write the first sentence and the last.

There is something else I will need to find a way to say about Cyrus, something the country has been quick to say and quicker to forget. He was fourteen. My youngest is fourteen. He walks to the corner store. He has friends who walk with him and friends who go alone, and he is, in the small geography of his life, exactly the age and exactly the kind of boy that Cyrus Carmack-Belton was on the afternoon a man came out of a Shell station with a gun and decided that a chase and a back and a parking lot would do for him. Cyrus had not done what they said he did. He ran. Whatever else he carried, and the testimony on that point was contested, what he did not do, according to the prosecutor and the witnesses called, was point a weapon at anyone. He died in the dirt on Parklane Road. The man who fired the shot is at home tonight. His family will, by what they have said, take their fight to civil court, where some measure of dignity may be recoverable, though nothing is recoverable, not really, not when the recovery must be measured against fourteen years, and the fourteen years are the fourteen years my own son has lived under this roof.

And there is something to say about Austin, because I owe it to him and I owe it to my own children. He was seventeen and he is dead. He was the age my oldest is tonight. His mother and his father and his twin brother Hunter, who held him as he died, are inside a grief I do not have a sentence for, and the country owes them more than it has given them, and so do I. That a jury returned the verdict it returned does not undo a single thing they have lost. That I am sitting here tonight thinking about asymmetry does not mean that one boy's death is less than another's. The Metcalfs are not abstractions to me. They are the family I would be tonight if a different boy at a different track meet had made a different decision with a different knife. There is no insurance against that knife, and there is no insurance against the doctrine that the country uses to sort one boy's death from another's. There is only the country, and what it does, and what it makes a parent learn.

I keep coming back to Samori in his bedroom. He was fifteen, and he had just watched his country tell him that a man could follow a Black boy through a Florida neighborhood with a gun, kill him, and walk free. *I've got to go.* My boys are not fifteen. One is younger than Samori was that night and one is older, and between them they live in the years on either side of the boy Coates was writing to. They have phones, and they have friends, and they have already seen more verdicts than Samori had seen by the time he stood up from his father's bed. They have watched, in the years they have been alive, the country render this same arithmetic over and over, in different cases, under different doctrines, with different names, and arrive at outcomes that should be impossible to arrive at if the doctrines meant what their plain language says they mean. I am not raising my sons in a country that has been surprised by what happened in Richland County, or by what happened in Collin County. I am raising my sons in a country that has been confirming itself.

They will ask me, sooner or later, what we are supposed to do about it. I cannot pretend, even alone, that I have an answer that fits on a card. What I have is a practice, which is the practice my father had, in different forms, in worse rooms than mine. The practice is to refuse the lie when it is told by our enemies, and to refuse the lie when it is told by our friends, and to refuse the lie, most of all, when it is the one we want to tell ourselves to get through the night. The lie has many costumes. Sometimes it says you do not really belong here, and you are required to know that you do. Sometimes it says you belong here so completely that none of this is happening, and you are required to know that it is. The practice is to walk the narrow corridor between those two lies with your back straight. That is the inheritance I have. That is the inheritance I have to give. The fourteen-year-old will get it in the words of a fourteen-year-old, and the seventeen-year-old will get it in the words of a seventeen-year-old, and the words will not be the same words, and the conversation will not be the same conversation, and I will have to find both of them, twice.

I cannot promise my sons that a jury will see them as it ought to see them. I cannot promise them that the doctrine that opened its door for Chikei Rick Chow will open its door for them, should they ever need it to. I cannot promise them that a tent at a track meet is a safe place, or that the parking lot of a convenience store is a safe place, or that the road between them will be safe. There are things I can promise them, and I have been promising them in smaller words their whole lives. I love them. I will not lie to them. I will not let the country lie to them, in this house, at this table. And when the country tells them they are alone in what it has done to them, they will know, because I will have told them, that they are not, and were not ever, and will not ever be.

The morning will come whether I am ready or not. I am ready in the only way a father is ever ready, which is to say I am not, and will be anyway. Before they wake, I will set this aside and put the coffee on. I will sit at the kitchen table where they have done their homework, and I will wait for them to come down. They may come down together or they may come down one at a time. The fourteen-year-old may want to talk and the seventeen-year-old may not, or it may be the other way around, or both may want to sit with me without saying anything for a long time, which is, in this house, one of the ways we talk. They may, both of them or only one of them, say what Samori said in another room on another night a long time ago. They may say *I've got to go*.

And here is what I cannot stop thinking about tonight, sitting at this table. When Samori said it, he went into his bedroom. The walls of his father's house were the one ground in the country where the verdict could not reach him. My boys, when they say it, may not stay inside any walls. They may have to walk out of the kitchen and out of the front door and onto the sidewalk, the same kind of sidewalk Cyrus Carmack-Belton was walking on, the same kind of parking lot Cyrus Carmack-Belton died in, the same kind of tent in the same kind of stadium Karmelo Anthony and Austin Metcalf were under. The need to step away from a thing that does not fit is the oldest, most ordinary, most human need a thinking child has. The country I have been writing about is the country that takes that need and makes it the act for which the doctrine is then applied. The room a Black boy walks out of to be alone with the news is sometimes the room he is killed for walking out of. I do not know how to make sense of that. I have not made my peace with it. I have not arrived at a father's posture in which I can release my sons into the country the verdicts described and pretend that the releasing is safe. It is not safe. And keeping them locked in this house, away from the country, away from the air and the school and the corner store and the track meet, is its own way of agreeing with the country that they do not belong in it. I will not agree with the country about that. I cannot lock the door behind them. I also cannot pretend, as they cross the threshold, that the threshold means what it should mean. We will live in the paradox, my sons and I. There is no other place to live.

So I will let them go where they need to go in the morning. I will not stop them. I will not follow them. I will sit at this kitchen table while they walk, holding the fear so that they do not have to hold all of it themselves, the way Black fathers have held that fear for their sons for as long as Black fathers have raised sons in this country. When they come home, I will be here, and I will not let them see that I was afraid. We do not pass the fear forward in its full size. We carry the heaviest part ourselves, so that they carry only what is left.

They will go. I will let them. They will come back. I will be here. And in the space between, where every Black father in this country has lived for as long as the country has existed, I will be doing the only work the country has not yet figured out how to take from me, which is the work of loving them, hard, while they walk the doctrine, and trusting them to come home, and being here when they do.

The truth is coming for them either way. Goodnight.
### The Jurisdiction Thereof
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-jurisdiction-thereof/
Last updated: 2026-06-08T12:35:05.000Z
There is a clause, written into the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 by men who had just watched a war kill six hundred thousand of their countrymen over the question of who counts as a person, and it reads with a plainness that ought to embarrass the lawyers now paid to complicate it: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens." That is the whole of it. The Republic, having once decided that a man could be property, decided in its grief that a child born on its soil could never again be a stranger to it.

I am a conservative, which means, among other things, that I believe in the written word over the willful man, in the text over the temper of whoever happens to hold power this season. And so I find myself, this June, in the strange and clarifying position of defending that clause against a president of the party I most often vote with.

In January of 2025, on his first day in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship for the children of those here illegally or only temporarily. The order has never taken effect; lower courts blocked it as likely unconstitutional, and now the case, Trump v. Barbara, sits before the Supreme Court, which will rule before the month is out. The government's argument turns on a sly reading of the word "domicile," a theory that the Constitution does not quite mean what it plainly says. Chief Justice John Roberts, no enemy of this administration, called the argument "quirky." Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whom the president himself placed on that bench, took the government's lawyer apart with the patience of a woman correcting a bright but lazy student.

They are right to be skeptical. In 1898, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Court already answered this question, holding that a child born here to parents who were themselves barred from citizenship was nonetheless a citizen, fully and irrevocably. That is the law. It has been the law for a hundred and twenty-eight years, through depressions and wars and every fevered season of nativism the country could manufacture.

Understand what is at stake, and you will see it is not only immigration. It is the question of whether the meaning of the Constitution belongs to the men who wrote and ratified it, or to whichever executive can summon a clever enough lawyer. A conservatism that cheers when its own man rewrites the founding charter by decree has forgotten the thing it was meant to conserve. The rule of law is not the rule of our friends. It is the wall that stands when our friends are gone and our enemies hold the pen.

A child will be born tonight, in a hospital in El Paso or Hartford or Fresno, to parents with no papers and no power. The Constitution says that child is one of us. The only question left is whether we still mean it.
### Call It By Its Name
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/call-it-by-its-name/
Last updated: 2026-06-08T12:25:22.000Z
Israel is a terrorist state. We owe the dead the discipline of saying that out loud, in plain English, by the only standards we have ever agreed apply. There is no other word that fits the documented record of its conduct, and there is not much integrity left in any language that refuses to use the word when the record demands it.

What we mean by the word is not in dispute. The United States Code, at 22 U.S.C. § 2656f, defines terrorism as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets." The criminal code, at 18 U.S.C. § 2331, defines international terrorism as violent acts "intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population" or to "influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion." The FBI's working definition is shorter and the same: the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government or civilian population in furtherance of political or social objectives. The United Nations' draft comprehensive convention on terrorism gathers the same core. Strip away the lawyering, and the unifying principle is plain: violence, or the threat of it, against civilians, for political coercion. The framers of those statutes wrote them with non-state actors in mind, but the conduct does not change its nature when a state is the one doing it. A state can perpetrate terror. A state has. The only question is whether we have the nerve to say so.

Begin with the most recent case. On the seventeenth and eighteenth of September, 2024, thousands of pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies, ordinary handheld devices distributed across an entire country, were detonated at the same moment in Lebanon. At least 37 people were killed, including two children. More than 3,400 were injured. Israel later acknowledged the operation. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, told the Security Council that the "simultaneous targeting of thousands of individuals, whether civilians or members of armed groups, without knowledge as to who was in possession of the targeted devices, their location and their surroundings at the time the attack" violates international human rights law and the laws of war. He reminded that body that "it is a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians." That is the language of the statutes. That is the definition. Indiscriminate violence, against a civilian-mixed target, for the political coercion of an adversary. There is the word.

Some will say the pager attack was an aberration. It was not. It was doctrine. In October 2008, the man who would later become Chief of the General Staff of the IDF, Maj. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, gave an interview to Yedioth Ahronoth. He said, in plain words, "What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there." That is not an admission squeezed out of him. That is the doctrine, named for a Beirut neighborhood the IDF had leveled, published proudly, signed by a sitting general. To call its application terrorism is not editorial license. It is taxonomy.

Then comes Gaza, and the language has to follow the record. Since October 2023, the Gaza Ministry of Health and the United Nations have tracked tens of thousands of dead. UNICEF's executive director told the Security Council that more than 17,000 children have been killed and 33,000 injured, the equivalent, she said, of a classroom of children killed every day. Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical complex in the strip, was besieged twice and left, in the words of the World Health Organization, in ruins, with hundreds of bodies found in and around it including in mass graves. Kamal Adwan, the last hospital in the north, was raided, its patients forcibly removed, the building set on fire. Bakeries, water systems, refugee camps, schools, universities, gone. On January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice found, by a vote of fifteen to two, that South Africa's allegations involve "plausible rights" under the Genocide Convention, and ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts of genocide. On November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, finding reasonable grounds to believe both bear criminal responsibility for "the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare" and "the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts." These are not pamphlets. These are the rulings of the two highest courts the civilized world has built.

But the years are the witness. In 1954, the Lavon affair: Israeli military intelligence recruited a cell to plant bombs inside American, British, and Egyptian civilian targets in Cairo and Alexandria, including a movie theater, intending to blame the violence on others. In 1973, in Lillehammer, Norway, Mossad agents shot a Moroccan waiter named Ahmed Bouchikhi thirteen times in front of his pregnant wife, having mistaken him for someone else, in the course of an assassination campaign that ranged across European cities. In 2008, in the Kafr Sousa neighborhood of Damascus, Imad Mughniyah was killed by a remotely detonated car bomb on the sovereign soil of another state. In 2010, in a Dubai hotel room, Mossad agents killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh using stolen and forged British, Australian, Irish, German, and French passports, triggering diplomatic expulsions across Europe. In 2020, on a road outside Tehran, the Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated by a remote-operated machine gun mounted on a parked truck. In 2006, in southern Lebanon, the United Nations Khiam observation post, a marked U.N. building that called the IDF liaison fourteen times to call off the bombardment, was struck by a 500-kilogram precision-guided bomb, and four unarmed U.N. peacekeepers, an Austrian, a Canadian, a Chinese, and a Finn, were killed. In 2022, in Jenin, an American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was shot in the head while wearing a vest that read PRESS. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented that Israel has killed more press members than any government since CPJ began keeping records in 1992\. NSO Group, the Israeli surveillance company, was placed on the U.S. Commerce Department's Entity List in November 2021 for selling spyware used against U.S. State Department officials, journalists at the Washington Post, and the family of Jamal Khashoggi. On July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion declaring Israel's continued occupation of the Palestinian Territories unlawful, and ordering the evacuation of all settlements. Inside those territories, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem has documented, in a report titled "Settler Violence = State Violence," that the IDF and police actively accompany or support settler attackers in nearly half of all documented incidents, while Yesh Din finds that fewer than three percent of investigations into ideological crimes against Palestinians ever end in conviction.

This is not a list of bad days. It is a pattern, sustained across seven decades, by sitting governments, in our names and on our money. Pattern is the legal definition of doctrine. Doctrine, when applied by a state against civilian targets for political coercion, is the legal definition of the word we will not use.

The category exists for a reason. We use it for Iran. We use it for Libya. We use it for North Korea. We use it for the men who fly planes into our buildings and the boys who strap on belts in Israeli marketplaces, and we are right to. Language is one of the oldest defenses a free people have against barbarism: the discipline of calling things what they are, even when the cost of naming is high, even when the named is a friend. To grant the word to one and deny it to another, not by conduct but by alliance, is not neutrality. It is the corruption that ends republics.

I am a father. I would like the country I leave my children to be one in which the law applies the same way to the powerful as to the weak, and language applies the same way to the friend as to the foe. We are not yet that country. We could become it. The first step is the smallest and the hardest: say the word the record has earned.

Call it by its name.
### The Dollar Remembers What We Forget
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-dollar-remembers-what-we-forget/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:56.000Z
There is a number that ought to keep a central banker awake, and the number is 3.8 percent. That is what the Consumer Price Index told us in April — prices rising at nearly twice the rate the Federal Reserve once swore, with the solemnity of a vow, to defend. Energy alone climbed 17.9 percent over the year, the steepest such jump since 2022, which is to say that the cost of warming a house and moving a truck and running a small shop has been quietly, relentlessly stolen from the people who can least afford the theft. And in the face of that number, on the twenty-ninth of April, a governor of the Federal Reserve named Stephen Miran cast his vote to make money cheaper still.

Understand what that means. To cut rates while inflation runs at 3.8 percent is not policy; it is a kind of forgetting. It is the decision to pour gasoline on a fire and call it warmth. Miran was appointed to the Board by a President who wants lower rates the way a debtor wants a forgiving creditor, and a man who votes the wishes of the man who appointed him is not a guardian of the currency — he is an instrument of the very pressure the currency was meant to resist. The dollar does not belong to the President. It does not belong to the Fed. It belongs to the night-shift nurse and the roofer and the widow living on what she saved, and every one of them is poorer this morning than they were a year ago.

I will say the harder thing, because it is true. The honor in that room belonged to the dissenters who wanted nothing given away. Beth Hammack of Cleveland, Neel Kashkari of Minneapolis, Lorie Logan of Dallas — they voted to strip the easing bias from the statement, to stop promising relief the data does not justify. Three of the four who broke ranks broke them in the direction of discipline. It was the first time since October of 1992 that four officials dissented at once, and the split tells you that even inside the temple, some still remember what the priests are for.

A currency is a promise a nation makes to its own people: that the labor you store today will buy roughly the same bread tomorrow. Break that promise slowly enough and no one riots; they simply grow tired, and suspicious, and small. The entrepreneur cannot plan, because the unit he plans in is dissolving. The saver is punished for the sin of prudence. The borrower with political friends is rewarded. This is not capitalism. It is a confidence game wearing the robes of monetary science.

Jerome Powell will soon be gone, and whoever follows will inherit a choice that is finally moral before it is technical. You can defend the dollar or you can debase it to please the powerful. You cannot do both. The number is 3.8 percent. The dollar remembers. The only question is whether we will.

---

**Related reading**

- [Inflation Is a Choice: Notes on a Chairman's First Test](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-is-a-choice-notes-on-a-chairman-s-first-test/)
- [Managing Inflation and Consumer Confidence](https://www.earlogarro.com/managing-inflation-and-consumer-confidence/)
- [Inflation: The Externality of Generous Fiscal Policies](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-the-externality-of-generous-fiscal-policies/)
- [The Ledger That Will Not Lie](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-ledger-that-will-not-lie/)
### Dirty Hands
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/dirty-hands/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:41:00.000Z
There is a man in Hartford whose name appears on both sides of the ledger — as counsel for the accused and, if the sworn allegations of the accused are to be believed, as the instrument of his conviction — and this man, Andrew Crumbie, has been given the authority, by a city that did not check, and amplified by a press that did not ask, to pronounce upon the moral fitness of a former mayor of New Britain, and I want to say plainly what no one in Connecticut seems willing to say, which is that Andrew Crumbie is a liar, that his lies are documented, that I have been calling him a liar in public and by name for years, and that he has never sued me, never demanded a retraction, never sent so much as a letter — because a defamation suit would mean discovery, and discovery would mean opening the files he has spent a decade hoping no one reads.

The Crumbie Law Group released, on June 4, 2026, a ninety-one-page report — ninety-one pages, the same number, as it happens, as the filing I swore against him in federal court, though I doubt anyone in New Britain noticed the symmetry — on Erin Stewart, the former mayor of New Britain, alleging she claimed $205,479.25 in severance when she was owed $16,006.20, that she billed Christmas Day as a working day, that she pursued a pension she had been told in writing she did not qualify for, that a subordinate signed authorization forms out of what the report itself describes as fear — and the report uses the words fraud, larceny, embezzlement, false statements, official misconduct, and the state police are investigating, and the FBI is investigating, and the Attorney General is investigating the Mayor’s Trophy Charitable Fund, and Mayor Danielle Sanchez halted the payments after ten of twenty installments, and maybe every word of it is true, I do not know and I am not here to defend Erin Stewart, but I know — because I lived it, because I filed it, because I swore to it under penalty of perjury in the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut — that the man who wrote those ninety-one pages is a man who lied about whether he represented his own client, to a grievance board, to appellate counsel, while the plea agreement bearing the name Crumbie Law Group sat in the federal court file like a body that refuses to stay buried.

My mother came from Kingston and my father from St. Croix and between them I learned that a man is what his record says he is, not what his letterhead claims, and Crumbie’s record says this: he was my attorney in a federal wire and mail fraud case, he negotiated plea terms with AUSA Christopher Mattei, Mattei asked him to “at least get O’Garro through the plea,” and in my 2255 motion — Case 3:18-cv-01275-AWT, ninety-one pages, August 1, 2018, sitting in PACER for anyone who gives a damn — I allege that while he represented me he was himself a criminal defendant in the same courthouse, that he identified me to the government, that he fed them my confidences on a constant basis, that he steered me into meetings with prosecutors without protection, that he built the case against me from inside the privilege that was supposed to shield me from exactly that. His record also says he was arrested on April 9, 2013, by West Hartford police — strangulation, third-degree assault, disorderly conduct, interfering — his wife the complainant, ten thousand dollars bond. His record says he was demoted from the state police forensic laboratory and accused the Rell and Moody administrations of discrimination and settled in 2008\. And from this, from all of this, Chief Justice Chase Rogers appointed him to the Client Security Fund Committee, which adjudicates claims against lawyers who steal from their clients, and he chairs the Citizenship Fund, and he sits on the Saint Francis Foundation board, and every appointment is a lie told in the language of respectability to a public that has been trained not to check.

CT Mirror printed his findings. NBC Connecticut broadcast them. The Daily Voice circulated them as though the words Crumbie Law Group were a seal of authority rather than a warning label. Not one of these outlets typed his name into PACER. Not one of them found my blog, where I have been writing about this man for years. Not one of them pulled the West Hartford arrest. Five minutes — that is all it would have cost them, and they did not spend it, because checking the source would have killed the story and not checking killed only the truth, and in Connecticut the truth has always been the cheaper casualty.

Crumbie is a cuck — and I use the word deliberately, because it is precise, because it describes exactly what he is: a man used by the system to deliver verdicts dressed as investigations, a man who submits to the arrangement because the arrangement feeds him, a man who will write whatever needs to be written about whoever needs to be written about, regardless of the presumption of innocence, regardless of due process, regardless of the fact that Erin Stewart has not been convicted of anything. His report reads like a sentence, not an inquiry. That is what the system hired him to produce, and that is what he produced, because that is what cucks do — they perform on command, and the commander never has to sign his name. Connecticut does not need Andrew Crumbie to find the truth. Connecticut needs Andrew Crumbie to provide the conclusion, and a liar is the perfect man for that job, because a liar has already made his peace with the distance between what is said and what is so.

The record is public. It has always been public. And the silence of every institution that has refused to read it is itself a kind of testimony — not about Erin Stewart, and not about me, but about a state that has decided, with the calm of long practice, that the performance of accountability is all the accountability it needs.

---

**Related reading**

- [Haiti In Disarray](https://www.earlogarro.com/haiti-in-disarray/)
- [Where Is the Red Cross and the Half-Billion Dollars It Collected?](https://www.earlogarro.com/where-is-the-red-cross-and-the-half-billion-dollars-it-collected/)
- [Corrupticut: The Place Where Justice Goes To Die](https://www.earlogarro.com/corrupticut-the-place-where-justice-goes-to-die/)
- [Earl O'Garro Files Grievance Complaint Against Attorney Andrew Crumbie](https://www.earlogarro.com/earl-o-garro-files-grievance-complaint-against-attorney-andrew-crumbie/)
### Sixty Days
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/sixty-days/
Last updated: 2026-06-01T12:06:38.000Z
There is a strait at the mouth of the Persian Gulf barely twenty-one miles across at its narrowest point, and through it moves something close to a fifth of the world’s oil supply. For weeks, mines have floated beneath its surface — some placed, some drifting — and the tankers that would ordinarily pass without ceremony have been holding at anchor, waiting. This is what a war’s pause looks like from the water: not peace, but hesitation.

President Trump has been sitting on a deal. The broad outlines have been public for days: a sixty-day memorandum of understanding with Iran, under which the Strait of Hormuz would reopen, Iranian mines be removed within thirty days, Iran’s enriched uranium surrendered or diluted, and enrichment itself paused — in exchange for sanctions relief, the right to sell oil, and sixty days in which to negotiate something more permanent. Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have been the architects; Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has been the counterpart. Last Thursday, Trump sat in the Situation Room and walked out without signing.

What is being asked here is faith. Faith that a regime whose proxies in Lebanon keep firing through a nominal ceasefire, whose Foreign Minister only weeks ago denied that talks were even happening, will honor a sixty-day commitment and emerge ready to permanently relinquish nuclear ambitions. Barack Obama asked us for this same faith in 2015, with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The JCPOA bought a temporary enrichment pause, gave Tehran sanctions relief, and left the central question — can this state be trusted with nuclear-grade material? — unresolved. Trump tore it up in 2018\. Now his own envoys have drafted something that echoes it in structure.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced this week that Israel would intensify its strikes on Lebanon to “crush” Hezbollah — this while a ceasefire nominally exists, and while American diplomats are in the final yards of a deal that explicitly requires Lebanon’s inclusion. Netanyahu called Trump on Saturday to object to that clause. By Monday, Israeli strikes had escalated regardless. An ally is actively undermining an American diplomatic effort, and the administration has said very little about it. Trump, for his part, told a Cabinet meeting that Iran was “negotiating on fumes.” Perhaps. Or perhaps the fumes belong to everyone in this arrangement.

The people who will live inside the consequences of this deal are not the negotiators — not Witkoff, not Kushner, not Araghchi, conferring in Oman and Rome. They are the civilians in Lebanon’s south, in Tehran’s poorer neighborhoods, in Gaza’s rubble, whose daily reality is determined by what men with titles decide in rooms they will never enter. A sixty-day window is not a peace. It is a pause with a deadline attached.

Maybe it holds. There is a version of this that works — the MOU stands, negotiations proceed in good faith, Netanyahu accepts the arrangement and the permanent deal gets done. That version is possible. But a conservative reading of history teaches us to weigh the cost of credulity. The Strait will open, if Trump signs. The sixty days will begin their count. The only honest question, before the ink dries, is what we intend to do on day sixty-one.
### The Weight of the Chair
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-weight-of-the-chair/
Last updated: 2026-05-29T12:12:23.000Z
There is a particular kind of gravity that settles on a man when he inherits what he did not build but must now answer for. Kevin Warsh, newly sworn in as the seventeenth chair of the Federal Reserve, sat in the East Room of the White House on May 22 and received a charge that no confirmation vote could adequately describe. His first FOMC meeting — the one where he will actually pull the lever, or refuse to — is June 16\. He has twenty-four days.

Consider what he inherits. The national debt has crossed $39 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office tells us that the Treasury is paying, in interest alone, three billion dollars per day to service that figure — a number so large, so abstract, so disconnected from the lived experience of any human being, that it slips past us like weather. It should not slip past us. Three billion dollars a day is what the richest government in the history of the world pays each morning simply to keep the lights on, before a single road is built, a single veteran is treated, a single dollar is spent on anything that could be called governance. This is not a policy question. It is an accounting catastrophe.

And Warsh arrives against this backdrop with a Federal Open Market Committee that is openly, historically fractured. At the April 28 meeting, four of the twelve voting members dissented — the first time since October 1992 that a Fed decision has produced four dissenters. One wanted a cut; three, including Lorie Logan of Dallas, Beth Hammack of Cleveland, and Neel Kashkari of Minneapolis, objected to language in the official statement suggesting the only possible next move was down. They were right to object. An institution that commits in writing to a one-directional bias, while inflation runs at multi-year highs, is not a central bank. It is a political weather vane.

Which brings us to the deeper question that Warsh's confirmation cannot answer: whether the Federal Reserve is still capable of independence, or whether it has been so thoroughly politicized — by Jerome Powell's accommodationist decade, by the Trump administration's Department of Justice opening a criminal investigation of the central bank, by the confirmation drama that required the investigation to be dropped before the Senate could vote — that independence is now a courtesy title, like a constitutional monarchy. The vote itself was 54-45, the most divisive in Fed history. Senator John Fetterman was the only Democrat who crossed over. The institution that is supposed to stand outside partisan combat has now been fully absorbed by it.

Warsh was once known as a hawk. He dissented in 2010 against the second round of quantitative easing, warning that the Fed was purchasing credibility problems for the future. He was correct. In recent years he softened, arguing that artificial intelligence would cool inflation through productivity gains. The theory is not absurd. But theories have a way of dissolving when grocery prices do not.

What the moment demands is simple to state and nearly impossible to deliver: the willingness to accept economic pain in defense of the dollar's value and the long-run stability that every business owner, every pension holder, every person who has ever saved a dollar depends upon. That willingness requires saying no — to the White House, to the easing faction inside the FOMC, to the bond markets that have become addicted to cheap money. Whether the man who took the oath in the East Room has that willingness is the only monetary policy question that matters right now.

Everything else is ceremony.
### The Fire We Feed
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-fire-we-feed/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T12:41:50.000Z
There is a ceasefire in the Middle East, or so we are told. The United States brokered it — a negotiated halt to the war with Iran that was announced on April 8 with the usual pageantry of American diplomatic achievement. Flags, statements, the careful use of the word "historic." And yet, since that ceasefire took hold, Israeli forces have killed at least 880 Palestinians in Gaza. In April alone, Israel carried out 35 percent more strikes than in March. The Gaza Health Ministry reports a total now exceeding 72,000 dead since the war began.

One is tempted to ask: what, precisely, did we stop?

Benjamin Netanyahu is conducting a masterclass in using American credibility as a shield. His government is under pressure from a right-wing coalition whose political survival depends on continuing the conflict. Israel's next national election is expected in September; analysts and human rights officials now say plainly what diplomats whisper — that Netanyahu is deliberately stalling the peace process. The ceasefire framework exists. The second phase was announced in January. But the bombs have not stopped. In May, Israeli forces issued forced evacuation orders by phone — twelve documented cases in the central camps of Nuseirat, Bureij, and Maghazi — before demolishing residential blocks. These are not military operations. They are the systematic erasure of neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, the United States calls this a win.

The conservative tradition worth defending is not, at its best, indifferent to the suffering of civilians. Nor is it naive about the way great powers get captured by smaller ones. Israel has legitimate security interests. Hamas bears genuine responsibility for the catastrophe it invited. Both things can be true. But a third thing is also true: the United States has become the indispensable enabler of a policy its ally has no intention of concluding, in service of an election its prime minister has no intention of losing. This is not an alliance — it is a dependency, running in both directions.

There is a concept familiar to anyone who has studied the moral logic of intervention: moral hazard. When you agree to absorb the costs of another party's decisions, you change the calculus of the decisions they make. Israel can stall because Washington will not impose a cost for stalling. Netanyahu can bomb Nuseirat because American diplomats will still show up at the next press conference and pronounce progress. We have bought our ally's war with our credibility, and he has priced that credibility accordingly.

What does a serious conservative foreign policy look like in a situation like this? It looks like conditionality. It looks like the willingness to say that American support is contingent on American interests — and that American interests include not being made to look impotent and complicit at the same time. The United States has more leverage over Israel than over almost any other country on earth. That leverage is being spent, right now, on nothing.

The ceasefire, if we insist on calling it that, is a document. The war is a fact. And the people of Gaza — who did not vote for Hamas, who were not consulted about the October 7th attack that triggered this catastrophe — are paying the price for a peace that was never meant to reach them.

Eight hundred and eighty dead since the peace was declared. The meter is still running.
### The Accountants You Can't Fire
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-accountants-you-can-t-fire/
Last updated: 2026-05-22T20:11:13.000Z
There is a certain kind of debt that cannot be named, denied, or negotiated away — and the bond market has no patience for those who try. This week, as Congress pressed forward on what Speaker Mike Johnson calls the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," the 10-year Treasury yield climbed to its highest level in more than a year, brushing 4.7 percent before settling back toward the mid-fours by Friday. The market is not confused. The market is speaking.

The Congressional Budget Office reported what the sponsors of this legislation will not: that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as written, would add $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. Three-point-four trillion dollars. Not stimulus. Not investment. Debt — the kind that compounds, that crowds out private capital, that transfers wealth from those who produce it to those who issue the instruments that service it. Moody's stripped the United States of its last triple-A credit rating in May of last year, and at the time that felt like a warning. What we are watching now is the warning being ignored.

Kevin Warsh was confirmed as the eleventh chair of the Federal Reserve on May 13 in a 54-to-45 vote — the closest in the modern era, the most partisan in Fed history. He inherits a central bank that is watching inflation run at 3.5 percent year-over-year on the PCE measure while Congress enacts what amounts to a structural fiscal loosening. Warsh promised the Senate that he would use his own judgment and not take orders from the White House. That is a fine promise. It will be tested, and soon.

This is what fiscal recklessness actually costs. Not in the abstract — not in the form of a number on a white paper — but in the form of the price of money. When the government borrows at this scale, it competes directly with every entrepreneur who needs a line of credit, every small manufacturer who must finance inventory, every builder who funds a project on a floating rate. The Treasury does not apologize for this. It simply issues more notes. The market responds by demanding more yield, and the real economy absorbs the margin compression that follows.

Speaker Johnson stood on the House floor and proclaimed a new era of growth. President Trump signed his name to the ambition. The CBO — a nonpartisan office that has no political interest in exaggeration — said: three point four trillion. The bond market, which has no interest in anyone's narrative, said: we noticed.

To believe in free enterprise is to believe that capital is not free — that money has a cost, that credit must be rationed by price, and that governments which ignore this truth eventually impose it on everyone else. The bond vigilante is not an enemy of growth. He is the only honest accountant still working when the politicians have gone home.

The bill may yet be amended in the Senate. The deficit may yet shrink from its projected trajectory. But this week, the 10-year yield told us something that no press conference bothered to say: the reckoning is not coming. It is already here, priced at 4.7 percent and rising.
### What Was Sold Last Night: A Letter to My Children on the Defeat of Thomas Massie
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/what-was-sold-last-night-a-letter-to-my-children-on-the-defeat-of-thomas-massie/
Last updated: 2026-05-20T13:31:58.000Z
My children:

I have started this letter and stopped, started it and stopped, because there are some things a father does not want to be the one to tell. But the news will reach you in time, from every side, and if you are going to hear it from a hundred sources I would have you hear it first from me, and hear it plainly, because the truth is what I owe you, and because there is no one else in the world who loves you the way I do.

Last night, on the nineteenth of May, in the year two thousand twenty-six, a man in Kentucky named Thomas Massie lost his seat in the United States House of Representatives. He had held it for fourteen years. He represented the Fourth District of his state, which is, by the constitutional bargain we were all born into, the only part of America he was elected to serve. He lost to a man named Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL endorsed by the president; and that, in another country and in another year, might have been the whole of the story, and it might have been a small one. But there is more to tell you, and you must know it.

The race that defeated Thomas Massie cost more than thirty-two million dollars. It became, by that figure, the most expensive primary election in the history of the United States House — more than any race for any seat for any reason in any year since the republic began. Groups organized in support of a foreign country put more than fifteen million dollars into the contest, against one man. AIPAC’s super political action committee, the United Democracy Project, spent more than four million dollars by itself. The Republican Jewish Coalition’s victory fund spent close to five million more. The largest single donor to the super PAC formed expressly to remove Massie was Paul Singer; the donor Massie named most often himself was Miriam Adelson. Almost none of this money came from the Fourth District of Kentucky. Most of it did not come from Kentucky at all.

I want you to understand what that means, because the headlines will not make it clear, and the men who write the headlines will not, in many cases, want it to be clear.

It means that the people of one congressional district in this country did not, last night, decide who would represent them. A foreign-policy lobby — an organization whose stated purpose is to advance the interests of a foreign government in the councils of our own — did. It means that the price of a seat in the people’s House has been publicly named, and that any future congressman who steps out of line with that lobby now knows what will be spent against him. It means that the most ancient and modest defense a free people have — that we choose the men and women who govern us — has been put on the auction block, and we know now what the auction looks like, and we know now what it sells for.

You will be told, by people who would rather you not think too hard about this, that the money does not buy outcomes. You will be told that voters decide; that the lobby only persuades. Do not believe them. The people who poured fifteen million dollars into Kentucky did not do it for the love of persuasion. They had a vote they wanted to remove, and they removed it. AIPAC said so itself. “Our community,” they wrote on the morning after, “was proud to support Gallrein and help ensure Massie’s defeat.” That is not the language of persuasion. That is the language of a hunt that has been brought to its conclusion.

I do not want you to grow up afraid. I want you to grow up clear.

So hear me clearly. What happened last night is alarming, and it is terrifying, and it is a significant concern to our democracy — and I want all three of those words spoken plainly, because all three of them are true. It is alarming that one lobby has this much money. It is terrifying that it has the will to spend it on a single seat. And it is, finally, a significant concern to our democracy because if it can be done to Thomas Massie — in a district he had carried by wide margins, election after election, for more than a decade — it can be done to anyone. That is the report I am required to make to you. I would shield you from a great many small things, but I will not lie to you about this.

There is one more piece of the story, and you must hear it too, because it is the piece that explains the rest.

In the year nineteen sixty-two, the United States Department of Justice ordered an organization called the American Zionist Council — the lobby that was then doing the work AIPAC does now — to register as a foreign agent under a law called the Foreign Agents Registration Act. That law is older than I am, and older than your grandfather; it was written in 1938, when the country had learned, late and at great cost, that foreign powers will try to influence American politics through American front groups, and that the modest decency owed to a free people is that those groups must say, out loud, who they are working for. The American Zionist Council did not want to say it. So the work was moved into a new shell, organized in 1963 under a new name — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — and the disclosure was never made, and the order was, in time, allowed to lapse. The lobby that ended Thomas Massie’s career last night is the lineal heir of the organization that was once told by its own government that it must register, and never did.

Days before he was voted out, Massie introduced a bill to require it to register at last. He called it the AIPAC Act. He will not be in the next Congress to see that bill move. It will, in all likelihood, never move at all.

Now, my children. Hear me.

I am not telling you these things because I want you to grieve. There is nothing in grief, by itself, that builds anything. I am telling you because you are going to grow up in a country in which a sitting representative can be unseated by a foreign-policy lobby for the price of a midsize office building, and you must know it, because if you do not know it you will be helpless against it. The first defense a free people have is not their courts, and not their guns, and not even their votes — it is their plain refusal to be lied to. It is their plain insistence that things be called what they are. AIPAC is an organization. The United Democracy Project is a political action committee. Money is money. What was done last night was done in the open. You will not hear most of your countrymen call it what it was. That does not change what it was.

So here is what I require of you.

I require you to know your country well enough to know when it has been sold around you, and brave enough to say so when it has. I require you to read the paper trail. I require you to refuse the small comfort of pretending that the people who took Thomas Massie’s seat are anything other than what they are. I require you to vote — and to do more than vote — for the disclosure that was refused, and for the sovereignty that was given up, and for the simple, almost humiliatingly old idea that the men and women who write our laws should be answerable to the people they were elected to serve, and to no one else, and to no other country, ever.

You will be told that this is impossible. You will be told that the lobby cannot be unwound, that the money cannot be pulled back, that the country has always been like this and there is no use in fighting it. None of that is true. The country has been like this for a long time, but it has not been like this forever, and it does not have to be like this when you have children of your own. The men who built the system can be made, by your generation, to unbuild it. Stranger things have been done in this republic. Read your own history; you will find them.

I love you. I will love you when I am dead and you read this again. I have loved you from before you could speak, and I will love you in the country that has been left to you, whatever it becomes.

Take care of each other. Take care of the truth. And remember, when they tell you the seat cannot be bought back, that the seat was never theirs to sell.

Your father,

Earl
### The Promise of Easy Wars
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-promise-of-easy-wars/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:41:01.000Z
In February of this year, the United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran. They said it was to destroy Iran's nuclear program, to end the regime's sponsorship of proxy forces, to remove a threat from the board once and for all. The language was clean, technical, inevitable. There would be a reckoning — quick, decisive, surgical.

That was three months ago. Today, the ceasefire that was supposed to produce a deal is what Donald Trump himself called "on massive life support." The Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil must pass — remains contested. On May 7th, American and Iranian forces opened fire in those waters, each side insisting the other fired first. On May 16th, Trump declared that Iran faces a "pressing timeline" and will have a "very bad time." The White House has confirmed a meeting on May 19th to discuss resuming full-scale military operations against Iran.

This is how easy wars end.

There is a particular American habit — it is not a Republican habit or a Democratic habit, it belongs to the republic itself — of believing that the next intervention will be the clean one. That the adversary will fold as promised. That the victory will arrive before the costs compound. That the architects of the strike will be remembered as liberators, not as men who started something they could not finish.

And so we find ourselves here again. A ceasefire described by the President as being on life support. A regime that did not collapse. A nuclear stockpile whose ultimate disposition has not been resolved — because Iran insists on addressing it later, if at all, while Washington insisted that eliminating it was the point of the war. The Times of Israel reports that Israeli officials are now alarmed not that the war might resume, but that Trump might accept a framework that defers the nuclear question entirely — trading short-term relief for long-term ambiguity. We began this war to end a nuclear program. We may end this war without ending a nuclear program.

The architects of this intervention were confident. The intelligence was solid. The strike packages were designed to achieve maximum effect. And perhaps they were right about all of those things — and still the question stands: what comes after? What does success require, concretely? What will it cost, and who will pay it?

The Strait of Hormuz is not a metaphor. It is a physical waterway through which real ships carry real oil, and right now it is partly closed. Prices have risen. American naval forces have traded fire with Iranian vessels. Men and women in uniform are paying the most immediate price for a policy designed in offices far from any sea those officers could see from their postings.

Trump improvises in public on this crisis — threats one day, review of proposals the next, the promise of being close to a deal followed by the ceasefire being on life support — and this is not a partisan observation. It is a description of what we are watching.

The republic owes its people honesty about the cost of the wars it chooses to fight. Not after the ceasefire collapses. Before the bombs fall. The promise of easy wars is the most expensive promise this government makes. It never stops being true, and it never stops being broken.

---

**Related reading**

- [The Price of Other People's Wars](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-price-of-other-people-s-wars/)
- [The Wages of Another Man's War](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-wages-of-another-man-s-war/)
- [The Peace That Some Cannot Afford](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-peace-that-some-cannot-afford-an-opinion/)
### The Lobby That Will Not Register
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-lobby-that-will-not-register/
Last updated: 2026-05-16T16:01:17.000Z
The primary in Kentucky's 4th Congressional District is three days away, and by every public accounting it is now the most expensive House primary in the history of the republic — more than twenty-five million dollars in advertising poured into one Republican contest in one Kentucky district. A great deal of that money has come, by way of a Washington super PAC called the United Democracy Project, from an organization whose own publicly stated mission is to persuade the United States government, in its own words, "to enact specific policies that create a strong, enduring and mutually beneficial relationship with our ally Israel." AIPAC says it itself. It puts the sentence on its website. A foreign-policy lobby spending tens of millions to remove an American congressman who votes the wrong way on foreign aid is exactly what it appears to be, and the honest thing is to say so.

The man on the receiving end is Thomas Massie, the Republican from Kentucky's fourth, an MIT-trained engineer who has built the most consistent voting record in Congress against foreign aid of every flavor. He has voted against aid to Ukraine. He has voted against aid to Egypt. He has voted against aid to Israel — including, in 2021, against a billion dollars for the Iron Dome system, the vote that put him on the lobby's map for good. Asked once whether he could be moved to fund one ally if not another, he answered with the bluntness that gets a man into trouble in Washington and out of trouble at home: "What's so hard for you to understand, I'm not for funding any of it." He treats the foreign-aid consensus as the indictment of bipartisanship, not its vindication. You do not have to agree with him on every count to see what a representative is supposed to look like.

He is also one of the very few elected Republicans who has refused to let the Epstein file go. He has called the present executive branch "the Epstein administration." He has said, on the record, that "Donald Trump himself has said that the release of the files are going to hurt his friends in West Palm Beach." That a sitting Republican congressman would name the sitting Republican president in this matter is almost unheard of, and we should not be too tired to notice it.

The money against him is not a secret. The United Democracy Project has dropped roughly $2.6 million into this race. The Republican Jewish Coalition has spent something on the order of $4 million more for his challenger, the Trump-endorsed Ed Gallrein. By Massie's own accounting on his campaign account — "AIPAC and closely associated entities have spent over $6 million to influence my election" — and he has said elsewhere that more than ninety percent of the money being spent to defeat him comes from the Israeli lobby. These are not new numbers in kind, only in scale. In 2024, UDP and its allies spent nearly $14.5 million to drive Jamaal Bowman out of New York's 16th, and roughly $9 million to drive Cori Bush out of Missouri's 1st, and afterward they bragged about both. AIPAC's pattern is to fund the defeat of members it judges unreliable on Israel and then claim the scalps on its own channels. It does not deny it. It celebrates it.

Here is where the argument turns. AIPAC is not registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. It says it should not have to be — American-funded, American members, no money from a foreign government — and that argument has held off the Justice Department for sixty years. But the history is not on the lobby's side. In November of 1962, the Justice Department ordered AIPAC's direct predecessor, the American Zionist Council, to register as a foreign agent under FARA, on the finding that the AZC was funded through the Jewish Agency for Israel. The AZC did not comply. Within six weeks, former AZC employees incorporated, in Washington, a new entity called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which took over the AZC's lobbying activities — and the Department of Justice kept the fact of that incorporation, as a structural answer to a FARA demand, out of the public record until 2008, when it was pried loose by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy and the researcher Grant F. Smith. AIPAC's founding form was, on the documentary record, a legal workaround to a registration demand it understood it could not meet. That is the strongest single argument for registration that exists, and it is the lobby's own paper trail.

This is why, yesterday, Massie introduced the Americans Insist on Political Agent Clarity Act — the AIPAC Act — and said: "The lobbying that happens on Capitol Hill should be reported if it's a foreign country, whether it's Great Britain, Australia, Turkey, Qatar, or Israel." That is the language of a citizen, not a partisan. It does not single out a people; it singles out a category of foreign interest, of which Israel is one example, and asks that a disclosure law passed by Congress in 1938 be applied evenly. It is the request the Kennedy Justice Department already made of the same lobby in 1962 — the request the lobby's reincorporation in 1963 was designed to escape.

The sovereignty question follows. The voters of Kentucky's 4th District are entitled to choose their own representative. They may want a congressman who votes against foreign aid; many of them clearly do, because it is why he has been their congressman for over a decade. When the deciding margin in a primary in northern Kentucky is supplied by a Washington super PAC organized around the foreign-policy interests of another country, the question of whose preferences are being represented in that seat is no longer a purely domestic one. The formal sovereignty of American foreign policy — the principle that what America does abroad is set by Americans for American interests — becomes, in those circumstances, a polite fiction. Money on this scale, deployed from this direction, does not lobby a congressman; it selects one. And selection, not persuasion, is the verb that ought to trouble us.

There remains the convergence, which is the part of this that should not be hurried past. Massie is being squeezed from two directions at once. From one side, a foreign-policy lobby that wants him gone because he will not vote the consensus on Israel, Ukraine, and Egypt. From the other, a party machinery, and a president personally, who want him quiet because he will not stop talking about Epstein. Both pressures land on the same one congressman in the same one primary in the same one week. That convergence is not coincidence. That is what it looks like when honest representation becomes structurally intolerable to organized power. A republic that finds itself unable to tolerate a single representative who votes his conscience on war abroad and tells the truth about predation at home has not lost an argument. It has lost a habit.

AIPAC is doing in Kentucky exactly what AIPAC was formed to do, and the law that would have required it to say so out loud was answered, in 1963, by reincorporation. We can keep arguing about whether the lobby's effect on our foreign policy is good or bad; that fight is worth having. What we cannot do, in good faith, is pretend the effect is not foreign. The most expensive House primary in American history is being decided, in part, by money raised to advance another country's interests, and the man on the wrong end of it is one of the few in Congress who will say so out loud. Three days from now, Kentucky will vote. The rest of us should at least watch with our eyes open.
### A Fire Already Burning
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/a-fire-already-burning/
Last updated: 2026-05-15T12:12:58.000Z
Kevin Warsh walked into the United States Senate on Wednesday and walked out with fifty-four votes and the most thankless job in American economic life. The 54-45 confirmation — the narrowest, the most partisan in modern Fed history — tells you something about the moment, not merely the man. It tells you that the country is so divided on the basic question of what money is, and who should govern it, that even the appointment of a central banker has become a partisan blood sport.

And Warsh, to be clear, is inheriting a fire already burning.

The April Consumer Price Index came in at 3.8 percent year-over-year — a three-year high. Not a rounding error. Not a blip. Three point eight. And if you think that headline number is sobering, consider the producer prices: up 6 percent in April from a year earlier, the fastest pace since December 2022, when the Federal Reserve was still scrambling to catch up with inflation it had spent two years calling "transitory." The bill, in other words, has not been paid. It has been refinanced, deferred, and now handed to a new chairman still getting his bearings.

Here is what makes this moment genuinely dangerous: the political physics are pulling in exactly the wrong direction. President Trump has made no secret of his desire for lower interest rates. He "joked" — and the quotation marks do real work — that he might sue Warsh if rates did not come down. Never mind that the Fed chair cannot move rates alone, that FOMC votes require a majority of the committee. The pressure is real, the signal is real, and markets know how to read presidential intent through the joke. Investors, for their part, now expect the Fed to hold its benchmark rate steady for the remainder of the year — and some have begun pricing in the risk of rate hikes if inflation worsens.

That is the trap. Not the one Warsh stepped into — the one that was built before he arrived.

You do not get 3.8 percent inflation by accident. You do not get 6 percent producer prices by accident. These are the compound consequences of years of extraordinary monetary accommodation, of near-zero interest rates maintained far past the point of necessity, of a central bank that spent a decade printing its way through every inconvenience and calling it stimulus. The fire was set. Warsh was handed the bucket.

The question that matters now is not whether Kevin Warsh is smart enough to navigate this — he is a serious economist who knows what it costs to break inflation's back. The question is whether he has the political endurance to do what the data requires in the face of a president who has explicitly telegraphed the outcome he expects. Sound money is never popular in the short run. It requires discipline, patience, and the willingness to absorb the anger of those who want the easy way.

If Warsh holds, history will be kind to him. If he folds, we will all pay the price — in the grocery aisle, in the mortgage statement, in the slow erosion of everything we worked to save. The fire is already burning. What he does next is the only thing that matters.
### The Names in the Book
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-names-in-the-book/
Last updated: 2026-05-12T09:57:20.000Z
There is a moment in every father's life — a small, ordinary moment, perhaps over toast and homework, perhaps in the slow walk from a car to a schoolyard — when the country he lives in stops being an abstraction and becomes, suddenly and irrevocably, the thing his children will inherit. I have arrived at that moment more often than I would like, and never more sharply than in the slow, grinding, public revelation of what the men at the top of our republic did, knew, or refused to know about Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Because to read the names is to understand the country, and to understand the country is to be obliged, finally, to speak.

Let me speak then as a father, which is the office I cannot take off when I leave the house, and as a conservative who still believes that free men in a free market are the surest defense a republic has against tyranny — and let me say plainly: the Epstein matter is not a partisan curiosity. It is a portrait of an American oligarchy that pooled across parties, across borders, across temples and churches and trading floors, and that has now, through the slow grind of disclosure, been forced to sit for its own indictment. The names in the book are not a list of liberals or a list of conservatives, not a list of Christians or a list of Jews, not a list of Americans or a list of foreigners. They are a list of powerful men, and the children they harmed are not asking us to choose sides; they are asking us to choose them.

Consider Donald Trump, who in 2002 told New York magazine, "I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." It is a line one might think the author would, in hindsight, give a great deal to take back; it is a line that sits today, like a fingerprint on a wineglass, in the public record. Consider the bawdy fiftieth-birthday letter the Wall Street Journal reported in July 2025, bearing his signature and the outline of a naked woman, closing with the wish that every day be "another wonderful secret." Consider the Mar-a-Lago years, the parties documented in photographs, the flights, and then, around 2003 or 2004, the break — a break that, by the account of former Mar-a-Lago employees, came when an eighteen-year-old beautician returned from a house call to Epstein and reported what he had done. Consider, then, the question the country has never been allowed to ask cleanly: when did Donald Trump first understand what Jeffrey Epstein was, and what did he do once he understood?

And then, because power protects power, consider the Department of Justice in 2025\. Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News in February that the client list was "sitting on my desk right now to review." Five months later, on July 7, her department issued an unsigned memo declaring that there was no client list, no credible evidence of blackmail, and that "no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted." The country was, in effect, told to go home. It would not go home. It took a 427-to-1 vote in the House and a Senate passing the bill by unanimous consent to force the Epstein Files Transparency Act onto the president's desk in November, which he signed because, as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene later put it, by that point it had become a massive political problem. Greene, who broke with the president over precisely this, has said on the record that Trump told her, of the files, "My friends will get hurt. People you know, Marjorie, people at Mar-a-Lago. They're going to get hurt." Whatever one thinks of Greene — and I have my disagreements — the sentence does its work. It names the architecture. The friends. The protection. The hurt.

And what are the names? Leslie Wexner, the founder of L Brands, who in 1991 handed Epstein power of attorney over his fortune and later accused him of misappropriating "vast sums." Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the press baron Robert Maxwell, now serving twenty years for her role in the trafficking. Prince Andrew, who settled with Virginia Giuffre in February 2022 for an undisclosed sum and a charity donation, and who acknowledged in that settlement that "Jeffrey Epstein trafficked countless young girls over many years." Bill Clinton, who flew on Epstein's jet on at least four documented occasions in 2002 and 2003\. Bill Gates, whose meetings with Epstein continued, the New York Times has reported, well after Epstein's 2008 conviction. Larry Summers, former Treasury secretary, former Harvard president, whose emails with Epstein from 2013 to 2019 surfaced in the November 2025 release, who has resigned from the OpenAI board, taken leave from Harvard, and now is set to resign his professorship altogether. Joi Ito, who resigned the directorship of the MIT Media Lab in 2019 after admitting he had accepted $525,000 for the lab and $1.2 million more for his private ventures, and after his own staff confirmed that they had taken to calling Epstein "Voldemort" in the corridors. Jean-Luc Brunel, the French modeling-agency proprietor whom Epstein wired roughly a million dollars to launch MC2, found hanged in his cell at the Santé prison in Paris in February 2022\. Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, who has admitted meeting Epstein dozens of times, flying on his plane, and staying in an apartment that emails between his wife and Epstein's assistant referred to as "Ehud's apartment" — and whose Israeli security detail was coordinated, building to staff, through Epstein's own people. Alan Dershowitz, named in a 2014 court filing by Giuffre — an allegation she later abandoned in a 2022 dismissal — who has denied wrongdoing.

You will notice what this list is and is not. It is bipartisan. It is transatlantic. It is multi-faith. It is what an oligarchy actually looks like in the late American republic — not a cabal of one tribe, but a guild of access, where billionaires and former heads of state and university presidents and royalty discovered, in one another, the kind of camaraderie that only the very powerful can sustain. To frame this scandal as ethnic, religious, or national is to do the cover-up's work for it: it is to permit half the room to slip out the back while the other half is fed to the mob. The cover-up has never been about one people. It has been about a class.

And the children. We should say it plainly because no one in the press conferences will: girls were trafficked. Some were fourteen, some fifteen, some sixteen. Some had names. Some are dead. Virginia Giuffre is dead. The republic owes them more than memos that conclude no further disclosure is warranted.

I am a father. I will not raise my children in a country that builds its public morality on the unspoken agreement that the rich are different. The free market I believe in is not the freedom of certain men to buy silence; it is the freedom of every citizen, including the smallest, to live without being preyed upon. The conservatism I believe in is not the conservation of a power class; it is the conservation of a covenant — that the law applies, that the strong protect the weak, and that no signature on no birthday book and no friendship at no Mar-a-Lago party and no apartment in no Manhattan high-rise stands above the simple right of a girl to grow up.

Understand what comes next, because everything turns on it. There is one sin a citizen can be forgiven, and one he cannot. It is one thing not to know — to live and work and raise a family without ever learning what was done in those townhouses and on those planes. The world is wide; the days are short; ignorance, sometimes, is the most a republic can afford its people. But to know — to have read the depositions, to have seen the photographs, to have held in your hand the flight logs and the financial records and the unsigned memo declaring that no further disclosure is warranted — to know all of that, and to do nothing, is not ignorance. It is complicity. It is the slow, deliberate signature of a country that has decided, quietly and in our name, that the children were the price of doing business. And once a parent has seen that signature, there is no unseeing it. The question is no longer what was done to those girls. The question is what we, knowing, intend to do now.

I will not sign it. Not as a father. Not as a citizen. Not as a man who still believes a republic is a thing worth keeping. Release the files. All of them. Name the names. Put the men who flew on the plane under oath, and let them answer for themselves in the light. To every parent reading this who has ever held a child and felt the terrible, ordinary weight of the future in your hands — understand that this is not somebody else's outrage. It is yours. It is mine. It is the country we are leaving them. The girls who survived are owed our fury. The ones who did not are owed our reckoning. And every powerful man who knew, and did nothing, has earned his name on the same page as Epstein's — for the record, for the children, and for the simple, unsoftened truth that ignorance is one country and consent is another, and we have lived too long, and too comfortably, in the wrong one.
### The Levity of Empire
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-levity-of-empire/
Last updated: 2026-05-11T12:04:09.000Z
On the first day of May, before an audience at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches, the President of the United States stood at a podium in Florida and announced, with the easy cadence of a man returning from lunch, that his country would be "taking over" Cuba "almost immediately." He invoked the USS Abraham Lincoln by name, suggested its homeward course from the Persian Gulf could simply detour, and added, as if confirming an appointment on his calendar, "I like to finish a job." The White House did not clarify whether he meant it. Cuban officials, less protected by the cushion of presumed irony, took him at his word.

There is something in the American character — older than the present administration, deeper than any one man's vanity — that has always wanted to believe that other countries can be acquired the way one acquires a hotel, and that the morality of such an acquisition can be settled by tone. We have done it before. We did it in 1898, when the Maine sank and a generation of editors invented a war. We did it in 1961, at a beach whose name our schoolchildren no longer learn. And each time, we paid for it — not in the immediate accounting of dollars or marines, but in the slower accounting of credibility, of moral seriousness, of what the world believes our word to be worth.

To say from a podium that one will take a sovereign nation, and then to leave the world guessing whether the saying was sincere, is not strength; it is the carelessness of strength, which is something else entirely. A republic that jokes about annexation is a republic that has begun to forget the difference between itself and the empires it once defined itself against. And a conservative — the real kind, the kind who remembers that this country was founded in revolt against an empire — ought to feel that distinction in his bones.

There are honest arguments to be had about Miguel Díaz-Canel's government, about the suffering of the Cuban people under a regime that has outlasted ten American presidents, about the sanctions Mr. Trump signed that same afternoon broadening pressure on Havana's security apparatus, its energy sector, its financial services and its mines. Those arguments can be made on their merits. But they are not the arguments the President made. He did not argue. He gestured. He waved at an island ninety miles from Florida as one might wave at a piece of property under negotiation and said, in effect, that he would deal with it when he was finished with the other one.

The other one, of course, is Iran — a war we were told would be short, would be cheap, would be confined to surgical strikes and decisive ends, and which is now in its eleventh week, with American destroyers exchanging fire in the Strait of Hormuz and a confidential CIA assessment, reported this week, concluding that Tehran can endure the blockade for at least another three to four months. The carrier he would send to Cuba is the carrier still working in the Gulf. The job he likes to finish has not been finished yet.

A people that cannot speak plainly about war will not stay long out of it. A president who jokes about taking countries will, in time, be taken at his word — by the next country, and the next, and the country after that. The dignity of the republic is not in the size of its carrier groups. It is in what its president says, from a podium, when he thinks the audience is friendly and the microphone is hot.
### A Love Tap, A Long War
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/a-love-tap-a-long-war/
Last updated: 2026-05-08T22:40:57.000Z
There is a particular kind of dishonesty that begins to bloom whenever a republic finds itself at war and would rather not say so. It does not announce itself. It comes dressed in idiom — in the casual phrase, in the smiling shrug, in the assurance that whatever just happened in the dark waters between two nations was hardly anything at all. President Donald Trump, on Thursday, after three United States Navy destroyers — the USS Truxtun, the USS Rafael Peralta, and the USS Mason — exchanged fire with Iranian missiles, drones, and small boats in the Strait of Hormuz, called what we did a “love tap.” The phrase has a way of staying with you. It is the phrase of a man who has decided that honesty is too expensive to spend on his own people.

There are roughly fifteen thousand American servicemembers, today, in and around that strait, escorting tankers, intercepting cruise missiles, walking patiently past Iranian sea mines on the orders of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who told reporters at the Pentagon on the fifth of May that the United States had established “a powerful red, white and blue dome over the strait.” It is a phrase that suggests something fixed and finished, whereas the truth is that the dome is made of men. The men sleep in shifts. The men have families. Some of the men will not come home, and when they do not come home it will not be because we lost a war but because we declined to admit we were in one. A ceasefire that requires fifteen thousand of our people under live fire is not a ceasefire; it is a euphemism in uniform.

The conservative tradition — the older, sturdier strain of it, before slogan replaced argument — has always been suspicious of foreign adventures advertised as cheap. We were promised that the air campaign that began on the twenty-eighth of February would end quickly. It has not ended. We were told the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader would settle the question. It did not. We were told a blockade is not a war. It is. There is no honest definition of war that excludes the deliberate strangulation of a nation’s economy by your navy, while your destroyers trade missiles with theirs in waters one-fifth of the world’s oil must cross.

And here, in the gap between what we are doing and what we are willing to call it, is where the moral injury to a republic happens. Not in the strikes themselves, necessarily, and not even in the strategic question of whether Tehran ought to be made to bend. Reasonable men can disagree about that. The injury is in the language. It is in the assumption that the American citizen — and especially the American soldier — can be paid in euphemisms. “Love tap.” “Dome.” “Project Freedom” — which is the kind of phrase that makes a careful man suspicious of every project so named.

What is owed the citizen is the plain word. The plain word is war, and the plain question is whether we have decided, soberly and as a self-governing people, that this one is worth its cost. We have not decided. We have been told. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole moral substance of the republic.

If we are going to send our sons into a strait, let us at least look them in the face and say so.
### The Last Honest Number
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-last-honest-number/
Last updated: 2026-05-08T12:58:34.000Z
There was a time, not so long ago, when Americans believed that a number meant a thing — that a price was a fact about the world and not the polished opinion of a committee, that a dollar earned in the morning was a dollar still in the evening, that the savings of a working life would meet a working man at the other end of it without having been hollowed out by the hand of an economist. That belief — and let us call it what it was, a belief, half-religion and half-republican faith — has been quietly evacuated, room by room, until what remains is only the building: the marble columns, the sober press conferences, the carefully chosen verbs.

I have been thinking, this past week, about the spectacle of the Federal Reserve and what it has now become. On the twenty-ninth of April, four members of the Federal Open Market Committee dissented from the chairman's decision to hold rates steady — Stephen Miran, who wanted a quarter-point cut to please a President who has demanded that rates be brought to one percent or lower, and Neel Kashkari, Lorie Logan, and Beth Hammack, who refused to lend their names to the language of easing. It was the first such fracture since 1992\. And Jerome Powell, whose term as chairman ends in seven days — replaced, the Senate Banking Committee has voted, by Kevin Warsh — has announced that he will remain on the Board of Governors until the criminal investigation into a building renovation, which he has called a "pretext," is concluded. He has, in his own careful phrase, been left no choice.

We are told this is a crisis of independence. I do not believe in the crisis, exactly, because I do not believe the independence was ever quite what we were told it was. A committee of twelve, vested with the power to set the price of money in a nation of three hundred forty million, has always been a political body — it could not be otherwise — and the polite fiction of its insulation has only ever been the courtesy a great empire pays to its own embarrassments. What we are watching is not the death of independence. It is the moment the costume slips.

But do not, for that reason, mistake my meaning. The demand of President Donald Trump for one-percent rates is not the cure for a rigged regime; it is the same regime in louder clothing. To debase the dollar by political decree is to debase it more swiftly, more openly, more cruelly to the saver and to the small business owner who cannot move their wealth into hard assets at the speed of a hedge fund. The Federal Reserve has long been picking winners; the question now is only whether it will pick them quietly or by megaphone.

The harder, older answer is the one no one in this argument wishes to give. It is that the price of money should not be set by Stephen Miran or Kevin Warsh or any other appointed seer in a marble room — it should be discovered, painfully and honestly, by lenders and borrowers in a market the state has at last agreed to leave alone. Until we are willing to say that out loud, the inflation that is coming is not a misfortune but a verdict. And the children inheriting our debt will read it.
### The Wages of Another Man's War
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-wages-of-another-man-s-war/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:41:00.000Z
There is a particular cruelty in being asked to pay for a war you did not vote for, did not believe in, and were promised would be over by now. The founder reading this on a Monday morning — the woman running a fourteen-truck logistics outfit out of Bridgeport, the man who put his second mortgage into a coffee roaster in Hartford, the immigrant family holding together a four-store dry-cleaning chain on the strength of a revolving line of credit — none of them ordered the strikes that began on the twenty-eighth of February. None of them sat in the room when Benjamin Netanyahu, who has staked his political life on a campaign he named Epic Fury, told the cameras that Iran would be crushed "to dust, to ashes." None of them were consulted. And yet, every Monday since, the bill has arrived on their pump and in the curt language of their banker, and it is not a small bill.

Consider the Strait of Hormuz, a name most Americans had not learned to pronounce a year ago, through which one of every five barrels of traded oil still must pass. War-risk insurance for a single transit, which cost a hull about a quarter of a percent in January, now runs as high as five — sometimes ten — in the quotes that small carriers see, if they can get a quote at all. The Trump administration has been forced into the indignity of standing up a forty-billion-dollar federal reinsurance facility through the Development Finance Corporation, the United States government having become, by the logic of Mr. Netanyahu's certainty, the insurer of last resort for a war it did not declare and cannot end. Brent crude is up better than a quarter since the strikes began. The American pump, which read $2.98 in February, reads $4.30 today — a forty-four percent levy, paid, like all such levies, by the people least able to bear it. The Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge has climbed back to 3.5 percent. The Dallas Fed has produced a paper that politely calls this a shock; the woman whose diesel bill just consumed her June payroll cushion does not need a paper to tell her what it is.

It is worth saying plainly: Mr. Netanyahu over-sold this war and has under-delivered it, and Israeli journalists now use precisely those words. He promised regime change from the air, and then conceded, on camera, that "you can't make a revolution from the air." He promised a swift accounting and produced, instead, a stalemate that has killed more than fourteen hundred Iranians, more than a thousand Lebanese, eleven of his own citizens, and that proceeds against the moral backdrop of the seventy thousand Palestinians an Israeli officer himself has now acknowledged dead in Gaza. One does not have to admire the Iranian regime — and I do not — to see that the strategy of a foreign prime minister, executed with American ordnance and underwritten by the American taxpayer, has become a tax on the American small business, levied not by Congress but by the price of crude and the price of risk.

The conservative case is not that Iran's clerics deserve our sympathy. It is that no foreign leader, however confident, however well-armed, is owed an indefinite line of credit drawn on the cash flow of an American entrepreneur. War is the most expensive thing a free people can purchase, and the bill, when it arrives, is paid first by the small — by the founder whose margin was already thin, by the worker whose commute was already long, by the family whose grocery basket was already a calculation. The bill is real. It is being paid. And it is past time to ask, in plain language, who authorized it.

---

**Related reading**

- [The Price of Other People's Wars](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-price-of-other-people-s-wars/)
- [The Promise of Easy Wars](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-promise-of-easy-wars/)
- [The Peace That Some Cannot Afford](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-peace-that-some-cannot-afford-an-opinion/)
### The Receipt
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-receipt/
Last updated: 2026-05-03T15:52:15.000Z
There is a number a man ought to be made to look at. Three hundred and fifty-two billion dollars, since the founding of the State of Israel — that is what the Congressional Research Service and the Council on Foreign Relations have, between them, totaled — of which two hundred and sixty-three billion was military aid: bombs, fighter aircraft, the iron domes that protect a country whose own iron grip on Gaza we are then asked, by the same Prime Minister, to also pay for. In the two years since October of 2023, the figure has come to roughly thirty-four billion more by Brown University's Costs of War count — about forty-six dollars from every household in America, handed across the sea, with no vote at the kitchen table on whether we wanted to send it.

Then there is the Iran war, which Mr. Netanyahu launched with our planes and our consent. Brent crude is trading near a hundred and eight dollars; the Strait of Hormuz has been priced into uninsurability; war-risk premiums have gone from a quarter of one percent of hull value to ten; and the Trump administration, faced with the rates its allies' war had created, directed the Development Finance Corporation to stand up a forty-billion-dollar reinsurance facility to backstop the tankers. Forty billion more — not appropriated, not debated, simply assumed by the public balance sheet because Mr. Netanyahu wanted his ground component and Washington was too obedient to refuse. The same House of Representatives that voted, two-twelve to two-nineteen, to leave the President's war intact under the War Powers Resolution found, the next morning, that it had also voted to pay the insurance bill.

Now set that ledger beside the other ledger, the one nobody on the cable channels reads aloud. In the same eighteen months that Washington shipped thirty-four billion dollars in weapons to one country of nine million people, it terminated eighty-six percent of the awards that USAID had once carried — the agency itself dissolved, on the first of July, into the State Department, like a body dropped down a well. PEPFAR, the program a Republican president once called the moral high-water mark of his life, lost sixty-five percent of its awards. Sudan, the largest displacement crisis on earth, with thirty-three million human beings in need of food and medicine and nearly nine million driven from their homes, has had its 2026 humanitarian appeal funded at sixteen percent. Sixteen. The Democratic Republic of Congo: a black hole of forgotten suffering. Haiti: abandoned in a sentence. The Lancet has projected, on the basis of these cuts, fourteen million additional deaths by 2030 — four and a half million of them children — most of them, in the cold logic of the spreadsheet, African.

There is a word for what we are doing. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Netanyahu on charges that include the use of starvation as a method of warfare; the International Court of Justice has been asked to consider whether what he has done in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide. These are not slogans on a placard. They are the formal pleadings of the courts of mankind. And on the day those pleadings were filed, the United States was, by its checkbook and its veto and its silence, his quartermaster. To fund the bombs that fall on a clinic in Khan Younis while withdrawing the medicine from a clinic in Khartoum is not statecraft. It is, in any honest tongue, a crime — a crime of selection, a crime of priority, a crime against the universal claim every American once said his Constitution was written to defend.

And the wars do not end. Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, now Iran — each one an emergency, each emergency the predicate for the next, each next one the reason we cannot, this year, fix a road in Hartford or pay a teacher in Bridgeport or close a deficit that is consuming a fifth of every dollar Washington takes in. There is a cynicism, peculiar to an empire late in its arc, in which a nation that cannot afford its own children is asked to underwrite, indefinitely, another nation's belief that it cannot afford peace.

A friendship between nations is one thing; a standing order on a credit card with no monthly statement is another. Mr. Netanyahu's policy — the schoolhouse in Minab, the famine engineered in Gaza, the lengthening occupation of southern Lebanon, the open contempt for any restraint his own electorate might impose — is not a policy a free people would choose to finance if a free people were ever asked. The dignity of the American taxpayer, the dignity of the founder paying double for diesel, the dignity of the grandmother on a fixed income whose Social Security adjustment is being eaten by the inflation a war on the other side of the world is producing, and the dignity, as well, of the Sudanese mother whose child we let die in a tent because the appropriation went elsewhere — these dignities require, at long last, a no.

The relationship as it stands must end. Not the friendship; the blank check. Not the embassy; the entitlement. Not the people of Israel; the policy of Mr. Netanyahu, and the American complicity that signs every invoice. We have paid enough, and we have paid for enough, and the bill, finally, is the last argument any honest citizen still requires.
### The Coin Remembers
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-coin-remembers/
Last updated: 2026-05-01T12:11:20.000Z
There is a particular American tragedy in watching a man who served the institution he helped weaken now insist that the institution must be preserved. On May 15th, Jerome Powell will step down as chair of the Federal Reserve and, in a gesture without precedent since 1948, remain on the Board as a governor — a quiet rebuke, presumably, to a president who has made no secret of his desire to install someone, namely Kevin Warsh, who will obey him. Donald Trump, in his characteristic candor, has said he doesn't care that Powell is staying; he wants rates lowered, sharply, and he has said as much in plain English. Powell, in his last press conference, called for Fed independence in tones that sounded almost theological. And so the long, slow theater of American monetary policy continues — each man defending a fortress that has been quietly hollowed out for the better part of a century.

Let us be honest about what we are watching. The Federal Reserve has presided over the loss of more than ninety-five percent of the dollar's purchasing power since 1913\. It has financed wars it did not declare, bailed out the very institutions it was meant to oversee, and printed money during a pandemic at a pace that would have horrified its founders. To call it independent is to indulge in a kind of national flattery; it has always served the political appetites of its moment, only with a more dignified vocabulary. So when the cry now goes up that Fed independence is under threat, one wants to ask, gently, independence from what — from Congress, from the Treasury, from the people whose savings it has thinned year after year while assuring them all was well?

And yet — and this is where the moral question turns — the cure being prescribed is no cure at all. To replace a quietly compromised Fed with a loudly compromised one is not a reform; it is a confession. Mr. Trump's demand for cheaper money is the demand of every politician in every age: borrow now, pay later, let the next administration explain to the grocery cashier why eggs cost what they cost. The entrepreneur understands what the politician will not. Cheap money is a tax. It is a tax levied without a vote, paid by the prudent, the saver, the small business owner who borrowed at six percent and now watches his neighbor's debts dissolved by an inflation he never authorized. Mr. Warsh, should he be confirmed, will arrive at the Eccles Building with a mandate that is not monetary but political — and he will discover, as every chair before him has discovered, that the dollar does not bend to slogans.

A free people cannot indefinitely outsource the value of its currency to men in suits, regardless of their party. The dollar is not an abstraction; it is the receipt of a man's labor, the inheritance he leaves his children, the coiled spring of every business he dares to start. Debase it and you debase him. Whatever side wins this particular fight on Constitution Avenue, the enduring fight is older and harder: whether a nation that prints its way out of every reckoning can still claim to be a serious country, and whether its citizens — quiet, obstinate, productive — will continue to pay for political cowardice with the silent erosion of their own work. The coin remembers what the politicians forget.
### The Strait and the Schoolhouse
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-strait-and-the-schoolhouse/
Last updated: 2026-04-27T12:03:52.000Z
There is a school in Minab, in the south of Iran, that is no longer there. A missile is reported to have killed more than a hundred and fifty people inside it — most of them, the United Nations Independent Fact-Finding Mission noted in March, schoolgirls between the ages of seven and twelve. The detail is not decorative; it is the floor of the argument. Whatever Benjamin Netanyahu says he is doing in Iran — and he has said, on the record, that he "crushed the Iranian regime's destruction machine in advance" — he is doing it on top of that floor, and so are the men in Washington who sent the planes.

To the founder reading this on a Monday morning, the war may feel far away, until she opens her tanker-fuel surcharge, her credit-line statement, her shipping invoice. Then it is close. Brent crude is trading near one hundred and eight dollars a barrel as I write — up roughly two-thirds in a year. The International Energy Agency has called the shock the largest energy supply disruption on record. The Strait of Hormuz, through which one in five barrels of the world's oil moves, is, to use the dry phrasing of the futures desks, effectively closed. War-risk insurance for the strait has gone from a quarter of a percent of hull value to as much as ten percent — the difference, on a single hundred-million-dollar tanker, between a clerical fee and a five-million-dollar premium. Maritime insurers — Gard, Skuld, NorthStandard, the London P&I Club, the American Club — have walked away from the cover entirely. The benchmark very-large-crude-carrier rate jumped ninety-four percent in a single session. None of this stays at sea. It arrives on Main Street as a fuel surcharge, a delayed pallet, a credit officer who suddenly finds your line under review.

And here is the part the operator-class is invited to notice. Faced with the rates its allies' war had created, the Trump administration directed the Development Finance Corporation to stand up a forty-billion-dollar reinsurance facility — taxpayer paper, in plain English, to backstop the shipping of oil through a strait that a war of choice had made uninsurable. The same House of Representatives that refused, on a 212-to-219 vote, to constrain the war under the War Powers Resolution has effectively agreed to socialize its insurance bill. This is what a free-market man is meant to find intolerable: the costs of a foreign adventure laid, without a vote, on the back of every business that buys diesel.

Mr. Netanyahu has called all of this a victory whose war aims, his own polls now tell him, his own public no longer believes he has met. The schoolgirls in Minab will not be polled. The founder paying double for fuel was not asked. There is a name for a policy that produces dead children abroad, captured rents at home, and a bill nobody voted to incur, and the name is not security. It is, simply, the thing you and I are paying for.
### The Building on Constitution Avenue
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-building-on-constitution-avenue/
Last updated: 2026-04-26T22:29:23.000Z
There is, in this country, a building on Constitution Avenue that has come to mean what we will not say aloud. Its renovation cost a billion dollars more than promised — asbestos and sinkholes, we were told, the price of fixing what no one had thought to repair — and last week, on a Friday, the Department of Justice quietly closed its investigation into the man who signed the contracts. By Sunday, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina had withdrawn his objection to Kevin Warsh. By Wednesday, the Senate Banking Committee will vote. By the middle of May, Jerome Powell will be a private citizen, and the most consequential institution in American economic life will have a new steward — installed through a sequence that began with a federal investigation and ended only when the investigation was no longer needed.

I do not write this to mourn Mr. Powell. He was, for years, the patient steward of an inflation he insisted was transitory — a word that became, in time, a kind of doctrine, and then a kind of joke. Under his hand the central bank purchased trillions of dollars in bonds and called it accommodation, and the dollar in your pocket is worth what it is worth today because of what was done in that building on his watch. His departure is no tragedy.

What troubles me is the procedure. Because if the price of removing a Federal Reserve chairman is a criminal probe that can be opened on Monday and closed on Friday, then the man who comes next has been told — and the men who come after him have been told — that the building they govern is no longer their building. It belongs to whoever holds the leverage. And the leverage was held, in this case, by an executive branch that wanted a different chairman and got one.

Now Mr. Warsh, by every account, is a more sober monetarist than the man he replaces. He has spent a decade warning about debasement, about asset bubbles, about the moral hazard of a central bank that prints first and explains later. There is, in him, the possibility of a return to something resembling sound money. I would welcome it. Conservatives have argued for two generations that the dollar must mean something, that savings must be honored, that the man who works fifty years and puts his money in the bank should not find that the bank has been quietly emptied by people he never elected.

But sound money cannot be installed by intimidation. The integrity of a currency rests, in the end, on the integrity of the institutions that govern it — and an institution governed by leverage is no institution at all. It is a department of the executive, dressed in the costume of independence.

So the dollar this week is steadier than it ought to be. The market believes Mr. Warsh will be confirmed; the market believes the new chairman will be friendlier to the President; the market does not yet believe what it should — that we have just been shown, in plain daylight, how the next chairman, and the chairman after that, will be chosen. Not by argument. Not by record. By the file that sits on someone's desk, waiting.

The building on Constitution Avenue still stands. The question is whose building it is.
### The Quiet Theft
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-quiet-theft/
Last updated: 2026-04-24T12:11:40.000Z
There is a theft that no one will prosecute, committed in broad daylight, announced in press releases written in the anesthetized language of men who have been trained never to say what they mean. This week, while the country argued about borders and budgets and who sat where on the Sunday shows, the Federal Reserve quietly announced that it had discontinued the runoff of its balance sheet, that it would begin, once again, reserve management purchases, that it would enhance its standing repo operations — phrases so drained of meaning they could be mistaken for weather reports, so bloodless they pass through the nightly news unread. But the plain translation, the one we owe one another as adults, is this: the central bank is printing money again. They will not say it. They will never say it. And the dollar in your pocket, the dollar earned through work that has callused your hands and bent your back and stolen hours from your children, will be worth less tomorrow than it was today — not by accident, not by fate, but by choice.

My father came up from the islands and put on the uniform of this country because he believed the dollar meant something. He was not a theorist; he was a man. And my mother came from Kingston to nurse the sick in a language that was not quite her own, and she too believed the dollar meant something, because in her world money was what you traded your life for, hour by hour, shift by shift, and no woman who has sweated for a wage can fail to understand what it means when that wage is quietly diminished in the vault while she sleeps. This is not macroeconomics. This is not policy. This is a moral transaction, and when the men who manage our money choose inflation over discipline, the poor and the working and the thrifty pay first, they pay most, and they pay with the only capital they have ever had — time.

We have forgotten — or rather, we have been carefully taught to forget — that a dollar is not a number on a screen but a promise, and a promise broken often enough becomes a currency of a different kind, the currency of cynicism, the coin in which the entrepreneur learns to distrust contracts, in which the saver learns that virtue is punished, in which the young learn that there is no reward for delaying gratification because the ground beneath their feet is a conveyor belt moving backwards. The free market does not need the government to save it from imaginary dangers; it needs the government to stop creating real ones. The entrepreneur does not need cheap money; he needs honest money, the kind that holds its shape, the kind a man or a woman can build a life on, the kind that makes thrift possible and planning rational and the long arc of a family's striving something other than an exercise in running uphill on sand.

I learned this not at Wesleyan, where the prevailing wisdom held that the state is a kinder parent than the one you were born to, nor entirely at Syracuse, though the Whitman School taught me the mechanics of enterprise, but in the quiet between those places, in the space a young Black man carves out for himself when he refuses to mistake the fashionable for the true. The orthodoxies of our moment insist that inflation is a mystery, that deficits do not matter, that the central bank can conjure prosperity out of pressed keys on a terminal in Washington — and the people most injured by these doctrines are the very people they claim to protect. The single mother watching the grocery bill climb. The immigrant saving in dollars he no longer recognizes. The small business owner borrowing at rates whipsawed by men who have never met a payroll. There is no social program, no subsidy, no speech that can restore what is taken, daily and deliberately, through the debasement of the currency.

They will call this responsible. They will call it liquidity. They will call it anything but what it is. And somewhere, quietly, without speech or petition, the American worker will simply learn — again — that nothing is given, nothing is sacred, and the only balance sheet he can trust is his own.
### Notes on a Borrowed Dollar
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/notes-on-a-borrowed-dollar/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:57.000Z
There is something obscene, and I mean obscene in the old ecclesiastical sense — a thing set apart from the sacred — about the spectacle of grown men and women gathering quarterly in a marble room in Washington to decide, by vote, what the price of money will be, as if the cost of borrowing were a matter not of markets and risk and the patient accumulation of savings but of committee sentiment, of tea leaves read by bureaucrats, of twenty-five basis points conjured or withheld from the air above the Eccles Building like rain from a rain god. The March minutes tell us the committee voted eleven to one to do nothing, which is what committees most often vote to do, and what passes for policy in our country is increasingly this: the careful, professional, credentialed performance of indecision, while inflation above the target line continues its slow, patient work of consuming the dollar in every pocket that holds one.

I grew up between two worlds that taught me the truth about money before any economics seminar could confuse me. My mother came from Kingston with a nurse's training and a Jamaican's refusal to mistake paper for wealth; my father, born in St. Croix and dressed in the uniform of the United States Army, understood that what a man earns he must also defend. Between them I learned that a dollar is a promise, and a nation which breaks its promises by degrees — a penny here, a quarter-point there, a trillion appended quietly to the deficit while nobody is looking — becomes, in the end, a nation that cannot be trusted by its own citizens, let alone by its creditors abroad.

The Fed, we are told, may cut rates soon. The Fed, we are told, is waiting on data. The Fed, we are told, is threading the needle. But the needle was lost a long time ago, and what the Fed is really doing is what every priesthood does when the old theology collapses: performing the rites with ever-greater solemnity, hoping no one notices that the god has left the temple. The god, in our case, was sound money — the simple, stern, unglamorous conviction that a dollar saved today should purchase tomorrow what it purchased yesterday.

We did not lose this god in a single act of apostasy. We lost him the way nations always lose their better selves: in small capitulations, each one defended as prudence, each one celebrated as sophistication. And now we are surprised that our savings do not grow, that our young cannot buy homes, that the entrepreneur who builds a business with his own two hands must compete against men who build nothing and borrow everything at subsidized rates. The tariffs now blamed for half the excess inflation above target are merely the latest costume worn by an older sin — the conviction that Washington can engineer, by decree, the prosperity which only free men and free markets have ever actually produced.

Let me say it plainly, because the plain things are the ones they hope we will forget. Prosperity is not printed. It is not voted on by committees. It is made — in workshops, in small businesses, in the quiet early mornings of people who still believe that what you earn is what you own. Every dollar the state borrows is a dollar stolen from a child not yet born, and every rate the Fed manipulates is a thumb laid, gently, professionally, expertly, on the scale of a country that once knew better.

---

**Related reading**

- [Inflation Is a Choice: Notes on a Chairman's First Test](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-is-a-choice-notes-on-a-chairman-s-first-test/)
- [Managing Inflation and Consumer Confidence](https://www.earlogarro.com/managing-inflation-and-consumer-confidence/)
- [Inflation: The Externality of Generous Fiscal Policies](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-the-externality-of-generous-fiscal-policies/)
- [The Ledger That Will Not Lie](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-ledger-that-will-not-lie/)
### The Knock at the Temple Door
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-knock-at-the-temple-door/
Last updated: 2026-04-17T12:10:32.000Z
There is a building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., a white marble edifice overlooking the National Mall, and inside it — or so we are told — the guardians of our money sit in quiet deliberation over interest rates and inflation targets and the careful, clinical language of monetary policy. The Federal Reserve has long occupied a peculiar place in American life: too powerful to ignore, too opaque to understand, and too insulated, its critics say, from the democratic will of the people. And so when three prosecutors from the office of Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, arrived unannounced at the Fed's headquarters on Tuesday and asked for a "tour" of the building's ongoing renovation, they were not simply requesting access to a construction site. They were knocking on the door of the temple.

They were turned away, of course. A federal judge had already blocked the subpoenas Pirro's office served on the Fed, noting — with the kind of understatement that only a judge can muster — that the government had produced "essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime" and that the interest in the renovation project was "pretextual." The investigators were given a phone number for the Fed's legal team and sent on their way. But the episode, small as it may seem in the relentless churn of the news cycle, reveals something far larger and far more troubling than a failed walk-through of a construction zone.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying the Federal Reserve is above scrutiny. I have spent my career — from the classrooms of the Whitman School of Management to the hard arithmetic of running my own advisory firm — questioning the Fed's easy money, its endless interventions, its quiet erosion of the dollar's purchasing power that punishes savers and rewards speculators. The Fed deserves hard questions. It deserves relentless oversight. What it does not deserve, and what no institution in a republic deserves, is the use of prosecutorial power as theater, as a blunt instrument of political pressure dressed up in the borrowed authority of law enforcement.

Because the danger here is not that Jerome Powell might escape accountability for a $2.5 billion renovation. The danger is that we confuse spectacle with substance and in doing so lose sight of the real accountability the Fed owes the American people — accountability for a decade and a half of zero-interest-rate policy that inflated asset bubbles and left working families behind, for the money-printing binge of 2020 and 2021 that gave us the worst inflation in forty years, for an institutional culture that consistently favors Wall Street liquidity over Main Street stability. These are the crimes, if you want to call them that, and they will not be uncovered by showing up unannounced at a construction site with a clipboard and a camera.

My father, who served this country in the United States Army before the weight of the world took him from us in 1997, understood something about institutions that too many people in Washington have forgotten: you do not strengthen them by attacking their dignity, and you do not hold them accountable by making a show of force where a show of intellect is required. The Fed's failures are policy failures — failures of philosophy, of Keynesian hubris, of the arrogant belief that a handful of appointed officials can set the price of money for three hundred and thirty million people. You fight that with ideas. You fight it with sound money principles, with Austrian economics, with the courage to say that the emperor has no clothes and that the Phillips Curve is a fiction. You do not fight it with prosecutorial stunts.

The markets, meanwhile, have their own verdict. Consumer sentiment has fallen to its lowest level since the University of Michigan began keeping records. Inflation sits at 3.3 percent, still above target, while the Fed holds rates at 3.50 to 3.75 percent and waits. The Strait of Hormuz is disrupted. Energy prices climb. And the people — the actual people, the ones who buy groceries and fill gas tanks and wonder whether they can afford to retire — are watching all of this with the grim clarity of those who have been lied to before.

The knock at the temple door was theater. But the temple itself is crumbling — not from the outside in, but from the inside out. And until we are willing to name that rot for what it is, no amount of surprise visits will save us from what is coming.
### The Price of Other People's Wars
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-price-of-other-people-s-wars/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:41:00.000Z
There is a number on the gas pump, and there is a number in the Federal Reserve's minutes, and the distance between these two numbers — the one you see with your own eyes and the one they discuss in rooms you will never enter — is the precise measure of the lie they are telling you about the economy.

In March, gasoline prices surged twenty-one percent in a single month. The Consumer Price Index leapt to 3.3 percent year-over-year, nearly a full point higher than the month before, and the energy index — that cold, clinical phrase for the thing that determines whether a single mother can afford to drive to work — rose almost eleven percent. This is not an abstraction. This is the cost of the Iran war arriving at every kitchen table in America, settling itself into every household budget like an uninvited guest who has no intention of leaving.

And yet the Federal Reserve, that great cathedral of monetary authority, sits in its marble sanctum and contemplates — of all things — raising interest rates. The minutes from the March meeting reveal that more officials than before are willing to consider hikes, not cuts, because the inflation they helped engineer through years of easy money is now being reignited by a war whose costs cascade through energy, shipping, food, and semiconductor supply chains all at once. The Fed, which spent the better part of a decade flooding the economy with cheap dollars, which held rates at the floor while asset prices soared and the working class fell further behind, now finds itself trapped in a cage of its own making. It cannot cut rates without stoking the inflation that is already devouring paychecks. It cannot raise them without strangling an economy that grew at a pitiful 0.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025 — a number so anemic it barely registers as growth at all.

This is the arithmetic of empire and easy money, and it is not new. Every war inflates. Every central bank that prints its way through a crisis eventually meets the crisis that printing cannot solve. What is new, perhaps, is the particular cruelty of the timing — a ceasefire negotiated in Islamabad while American families negotiate which bills to pay first, a two-week pause in hostilities offered as though it were generosity while the price of everything continues its relentless climb.

My mother came to this country from Kingston, Jamaica, with a nurse's degree and the unshakeable conviction that work — real work, disciplined and daily — was the only honest path to anything worth having. She did not believe in windfalls or bailouts or the benevolence of institutions. She believed in showing up. And when I think about what inflation truly is, beneath the charts and the policy jargon, I think it is the slow, systemic punishment of people who do exactly what she did — who earn their money honestly, who save it carefully, who watch its value erode because someone in Washington decided that fiscal discipline was less important than political expedience.

The trade deficit widened again in February — $57.3 billion — because we remain a nation that consumes more than it creates, that imports more than it builds, that has confused financial engineering with actual engineering. And this, too, is a kind of war, quieter than the one in the Strait of Hormuz but no less consequential: the war against productive enterprise, against the entrepreneur who builds something real, against the small business owner who cannot hedge energy costs the way Goldman Sachs can, who does not have a lobbyist in Washington or a seat at the Fed's table.

The free market is not a theory. It is the lived reality of every person who wakes up and builds something — a business, a career, a family's future — without the luxury of a printing press or the power to set interest rates by committee. What we are witnessing now, in the convergence of war and inflation and institutional paralysis, is the cost of abandoning that reality in favor of managed economies and managed conflicts, both of which produce the same result: the managed decline of the people who can least afford it.

The gas pump does not lie. The Fed minutes equivocate, the press conferences parse, the projections shift like sand — but the number on the pump is the number on the pump. And if you want to understand the true state of this economy, do not read the minutes. Stand at the pump. Watch the numbers climb. That is the sermon no one in Washington wants to preach, and it is the only one worth hearing.

---

**Related reading**

- [The Wages of Another Man's War](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-wages-of-another-man-s-war/)
- [The Promise of Easy Wars](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-promise-of-easy-wars/)
- [The Peace That Some Cannot Afford](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-peace-that-some-cannot-afford-an-opinion/)
### The Price of Liberation
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-price-of-liberation/
Last updated: 2026-07-17T02:11:32.000Z
One year ago this month, we were told that liberation had arrived — not in the form of expanded freedom, not in the loosening of the chains that bind the entrepreneur, the small manufacturer, the woman importing fabrics for her business in Flatbush — but in the form of tariffs. Executive Order 14257, signed with ceremony in the Rose Garden on April 2, 2025, promised that factories would roar back, that prices would fall, that a new era of American wealth was being born. The word chosen was liberation. It is worth asking, twelve months later, from what — and for whom.

The numbers do not lie, though politicians on every side labor mightily to make them. Manufacturing employment has fallen in nine of the ten months since Liberation Day, shedding 89,000 jobs — the very jobs these tariffs were designed to save. The trade deficit did not shrink; it swelled to an all-time high. American families are paying, on average, $1,700 more per year in higher prices, with another $2,500 projected before the year is out. Seventy percent of Americans report feeling the weight of these costs at the register, at the gas pump, in the quiet arithmetic of a household budget that no longer adds up the way it used to.

And here is the thing that must be said plainly, because too few on the right are willing to say it: tariffs are not free enterprise. They are its opposite. They are the government deciding, with the blunt instrument of a tax on imports, which industries shall be protected and which shall be sacrificed, which consumers shall bear the cost and which corporations shall be shielded from the discipline of competition. This is not conservatism. This is central planning wearing a flag pin.

The Supreme Court, to its credit, understood this. In Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the Court held 6–3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not grant the president authority to impose tariffs — a ruling that was, at its core, a reassertion of constitutional order and the separation of powers. The emergency was manufactured. The power was seized. And yet the administration, undeterred, simply reached for another statute, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, and imposed a new surcharge within hours. The tariffs changed more than fifty times in a single year. Fifty times. No business can plan in that chaos. No entrepreneur can build on ground that shifts with every presidential proclamation.

I think of my mother, who came from Kingston with nothing but a nursing degree and a conviction that work — honest, relentless, unsubsidized work — was the only path that could not be taken from you. She did not ask the government to shield her from competition. She competed. That immigrant grit, that Caribbean refusal to wait for permission, is the engine of American prosperity, and it runs on freedom, not protection. Every tariff is a tax on that engine. Every trade barrier is a wall built not at the border but around the ambitions of the people who actually make this economy move.

The effective tariff rate now stands at 11 percent — the highest since 1943\. We are not making America wealthy again. We are making it expensive again, and calling the invoice a gift. The Federal Reserve holds rates at 3.65 percent, inflation projections have been revised upward, and the economy drifts in a haze of policy uncertainty that benefits no one except those close enough to power to profit from the next exemption, the next carve-out, the next favor disguised as policy.

Liberation, if it means anything at all, means trusting free people to trade freely — to buy, to sell, to build, to fail and build again without a bureaucrat's hand on the scale. What we got instead was a word emptied of its meaning and a bill we are all still paying.
### The Ledger That Will Not Lie
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-ledger-that-will-not-lie/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:55.000Z
There is a clock in Manhattan, on Sixth Avenue near Forty-Third Street, that does not tell time in any way most of us would find comforting. It counts, instead, the accumulation of a national obligation that has now surpassed thirty-nine trillion dollars — a figure so vast, so untethered from anything resembling human experience, that one is tempted to look away, to treat it as abstraction, the way one treats the distance between stars. But this is not abstraction. This is the bill. And it is addressed, with exquisite indifference, to every man, woman, and child who calls this republic home.

The United States crossed this threshold in March, adding a trillion dollars in barely five months, and the Federal Reserve Chairman himself — Jerome Powell, a man not given to theatrical alarm — conceded that while the current level of debt is not, in his careful phrasing, "unsustainable," the trajectory, and I quote, "will not end well." One must sit with that sentence. The man charged with stewarding the monetary architecture of the world's largest economy has told us, in the gentlest possible language, that we are on a road with no good destination. And yet the spending continues. The borrowing deepens. The interest alone — projected to exceed one trillion dollars this fiscal year — now dwarfs what we spend on national defense, on infrastructure, on the very sinews of the country we claim to be building.

I think of my father, and the fathers of so many who came to this country from Jamaica and Trinidad and Barbados, men who understood in their bones what it meant to owe nothing to anyone, who regarded debt not as a financial instrument but as a species of bondage. They built businesses — small ones, unglamorous ones — on the principle that you did not spend what you did not have, and that the future was something you protected by the discipline of the present. This was not ideology. This was survival. And it was, in its own quiet way, the most radical form of freedom available to a Black man in America: the freedom of a clear ledger.

What we have permitted our government to do is the precise opposite of that ethic. We have constructed an economy of perpetual deferral, in which every crisis — real or manufactured — becomes license to borrow against the unborn, to mortgage the labor of generations who have not yet drawn breath, much less cast a vote. The Iran conflict has only accelerated what was already a catastrophe in motion, layering war expenditures atop entitlement obligations atop interest payments in a structure that resembles nothing so much as a pyramid, and we know how pyramids end for those who arrive late.

The advocates of endless government expansion will tell you that debt is merely a tool, that a sovereign nation which prints its own currency cannot truly go bankrupt. This is technically true and spiritually catastrophic. A nation that cannot go bankrupt can still go hollow. It can still watch its currency erode, its purchasing power diminish, its young people locked out of homeownership by interest rates swollen with the weight of federal borrowing. The Congressional Budget Office projects debt held by the public will reach one hundred and twenty percent of GDP by 2036 — surpassing the record set in the aftermath of the Second World War, when at least we had the excuse of having defeated fascism.

The entrepreneur, the small business owner, the family stretching a paycheck to cover both groceries and tuition — these are the people who will pay for this reckoning, not in some distant future but now, in the interest rates on their loans, in the inflation that quietly devours their savings, in the opportunities foreclosed before they were ever offered. The free market does not require perfection. It requires honesty. And the most dishonest thing a government can do is to promise its people prosperity while burying them, silently and systematically, in debt they did not choose and cannot escape.

Thirty-nine trillion. Say it slowly. Let it sit in your mouth like something bitter, because that is what it is. It is the taste of a country living beyond its means and calling it governance. The ledger will not lie, even if we do.

---

**Related reading**

- [Inflation Is a Choice: Notes on a Chairman's First Test](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-is-a-choice-notes-on-a-chairman-s-first-test/)
- [Managing Inflation and Consumer Confidence](https://www.earlogarro.com/managing-inflation-and-consumer-confidence/)
- [Inflation: The Externality of Generous Fiscal Policies](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-the-externality-of-generous-fiscal-policies/)
- [The Dollar Remembers What We Forget](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-dollar-remembers-what-we-forget/)
### The Mercy We Cannot Afford: On Medicaid and the Courage to Reform
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-mercy-we-cannot-afford-on-medicaid-and-the-courage-to-reform/
Last updated: 2026-07-17T02:17:53.000Z
There is a particular kind of dishonesty that passes for compassion in this country, and it has held us captive for generations. It is the dishonesty of promising people that the government will take care of them while building a system so bloated, so inefficient, and so politically untouchable that it slowly devours the very treasury meant to sustain the nation. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act has placed the question of Medicaid reform squarely before us, and the response — predictable, theatrical, unburdened by nuance — has been to call it cruelty. But the cruelty, I submit, is what we have already been doing.

Nearly one trillion dollars in projected reductions over a decade sounds monstrous until you ask what the alternative looks like. The alternative is a federal program that has swelled far beyond its original purpose, consuming state budgets with the quiet voracity of a fire that no one is permitted to name. Medicaid was designed as a safety net for the poorest among us — the elderly, the disabled, children in genuine need. What it has become is something else entirely: a sprawling entitlement that now covers nearly one in four Americans, many of whom are able-bodied adults whom the program was never intended to serve. To point this out is not heartlessness. It is arithmetic.

I say this as a man whose family came to this country from Jamaica with a very particular understanding of what government can and cannot do. Where my family is from, you do not wait for the state to build your life. You build it yourself, with your hands and your mind and whatever community you are blessed enough to belong to. This is not ideology. It is survival. And it is a wisdom that America, in its best moments, has always understood — that the dignity of a person is not preserved by making them dependent but by equipping them to stand on their own.

The great lie of the entitlement state is that expansion equals compassion. It does not. Expansion without accountability equals bureaucracy, and bureaucracy is not mercy — it is machinery. Every dollar poured into a system that discourages work, that penalizes upward mobility, that traps families in a dependency from which there is no clear exit, is a dollar that could have been invested in the entrepreneurial spirit that built this country. Tax relief for small businesses. Vocational training. Incentives for the very communities that Medicaid claims to serve but, in practice, merely manages.

The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, continues its delicate dance of pretending that inflation is under control while the cost of groceries, rent, and medicine climbs higher every month. The working poor are not poor because the government gives them too little. They are poor because the government, through reckless monetary policy and runaway spending, has made the dollar in their pocket worth less than it was a year ago. You cannot print your way to prosperity. You cannot borrow your way to justice. And you cannot spend a nation into greatness while its currency slowly loses its meaning.

What the critics of reform refuse to confront is the question that matters most: What happens when the money runs out? Because it will run out. Debt is not abstract. It is a promise extracted from the future — from your children and mine — and the interest on that promise grows every day we refuse to act. The states now facing budget challenges because of these Medicaid changes were always going to face them. The federal government simply made it possible to pretend otherwise for a little while longer.

Reform is not the absence of mercy. It is the beginning of honesty. And honesty, in my experience, is the only foundation on which anything worth building has ever been built.
### Trump Administration's Gaza Settlement Plan: A Matter of Ethnic Cleansing
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/trump-administration-s-gaza-settlement-plan-a-matter-of-ethnic-cleansing/
Last updated: 2026-07-16T23:35:38.000Z
![Earl O'Garro opinion on Trump Administration's Gaza Settlement Plan: A Matter of Ethnic Cleansing
](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e16d0c_00c497692dd644b88b83fe9212aaa2b1~mv2.webp)

President Donald Trump revealed in February 2025 a highly contentious plan to transfer Palestinians from Gaza to neighboring countries like Egypt and Jordan. His plan was to transform Gaza into the "Riviera of the Middle East" and did not exclude using American forces to do so. The plan has been widely criticized as a means of ethnic cleansing, a term applied to the forced transfer of a religious or ethnic population from a particular territory, often with the use of violence or coercion.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres denounced the plan, outright calling it "ethnic cleansing" and reiterating that Gaza has to be included in any future Palestinian state. The forced transfer of millions of Palestinians would be a contravention of international law, like the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the forced transfer of protected populations. The right to remain in one's home is a fundamental human right, and attempting to remove a population from a territory contradicts these basic principles.

Even neighboring countries have rejected the proposal. King Abdullah II of Jordan reaffirmed his opposition to mass displacements in accordance with a typical Arab posture against such a step. Egypt and Jordan feel that absorbing displaced Palestinians would not only damage opportunities for a Palestinian state but would also lead to dire security and political instability in both countries.

The historic precedent of forced relocation emphasizes the gravity of such a plan. The Palestinians have already been subject to massive displacements, particularly during the 1948 Nakba and the Middle East war in 1967, and now have numerous refugees in neighboring nations. To do it again would double historic injustices and further destabilize the region. The plan also aligns with hard-line Israeli demands for Palestinian relocation and settlement expansion, which have been universally decried by the international community.

**Examples from History: Forced Displacement**

Throughout history, forced relocation and ethnic cleansing have been a recurring phenomenon. Some of the most widely known examples include:

**The Armenian Genocide (1915-1917)**

· The Ottoman Empire deported and systematically slaughtered 1.5 million Armenians, forcing many survivors into Syria's deserts.

· The majority of Armenians were removed from their homeland, with thousands being resettled and thousands more being killed.

**The Holocaust (1939-1945)**

- Nazi Germany systematically displaced and killed millions of European Jews.
- Other targeted populations included Slavs and Romani, many of whom were detained in ghettos and extermination camps.

**Partition of India (1947)**

- The partition of British India into India and Pakistan resulted in the displacement of approximately 15 million people based on religion.
- The violence surrounding the event led to an estimated 1-2 million deaths.

**The Nakba (1948)**

- Over 700,000 Palestinians were displaced or forced from their homes due to war and Israeli military actions.
- They became refugees in neighboring nations and have remained in exile ever since.

**Expulsion of Germans after World War II (1945-1950)**

- Millions of Germans from Eastern European nations such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary were displaced when borders were redrawn.
- An estimated 12-14 million were displaced, and hundreds of thousands lost their lives in the process.

**The Bosnian Genocide & Ethnic Cleansing (1992-1995)**

- Serb forces carried out ethnic cleansing against Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Croats during the Yugoslav Wars.
- Thousands were brutally murdered in atrocities like the Srebrenica genocide, and millions were displaced.

**The Rohingya Crisis (2017-Present)**

- Myanmar's armed forces drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims into Bangladesh.
- The United Nations has characterized mass murders, rapes, and village burnings as ethnic cleansing.

**Uyghur Repression in China (Ongoing)**

- The Chinese government has placed enormous numbers of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang internment camps.
- Reports indicate forced cultural assimilation, mass surveillance, and displacement, which some have described as a slow form of ethnic cleansing.

Trump's plan to relocate Palestinians from Gaza is a continuation of a long history of ethnic cleansing. It violates international law, disregards Palestinian rights and aspirations, and threatens regional stability. The international community has a duty to uphold principles of justice and human rights by rejecting such a plan and demanding a solution that maintains the dignity and sovereignty of the affected populations.

History has repeatedly proven that forced displacement results in long-term suffering, instability, and humanitarian crises. Instead of repeating these tragic mistakes, efforts should be focused on diplomatic solutions that promote peace, security, and self-determination for all.

Photo Credit: Gaza Strip - [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/11/what-is-gaza-strip-the-besieged-palestinian-enclave-under-israeli-assault](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/11/what-is-gaza-strip-the-besieged-palestinian-enclave-under-israeli-assault?ref=earlogarro.com)
### Creating an African Central Bank: Unleashing Economic Potential
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/creating-an-african-central-bank-unleashing-economic-potential/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:58.000Z
![Earl O’Garro's take on Creating an African Central Bank to unlock African economic development](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e16d0c_fe465b2246a64b8097a234a47f7a678a~mv2.jpg)

Africa, a continent of unparalleled diversity and untapped potential, has long grappled with economic challenges that have hindered its development. One bold solution that has been proposed is the creation of an African Central Bank, a unified monetary authority that could play a pivotal role in reshaping the continent's economic landscape. This essay explores the potential benefits of Africa establishing its own central bank, from fostering economic stability and growth to enhancing political cooperation and sovereignty.

To understand the benefits of an African Central Bank, it is essential to recognize the continent's current monetary landscape. Africa is home to 54 diverse nations, each with its own currency and monetary policy. This fragmentation poses significant challenges, from currency exchange costs to volatile exchange rates. A unified central bank could address these issues and offer numerous advantages.

First and foremost, an African Central Bank would promote economic stability. By establishing a single currency, monetary policy decisions would be streamlined, ensuring a consistent approach to issues like inflation and interest rates. This stability would attract foreign investment, reduce speculative currency trading, and boost economic growth across the continent. A stable currency would also protect savings and pensions from the erosive effects of hyperinflation, which have plagued several African nations in the past.

Moreover, a continental central bank could lead to increased fiscal discipline. African governments often struggle with deficits and unsustainable debt levels. The presence of a central bank could enforce prudent fiscal policies, limiting excessive borrowing and promoting fiscal responsibility. This, in turn, would enhance the overall economic health of African nations and reduce the risk of financial crises.

Another crucial benefit of an African Central Bank lies in its potential to facilitate intra-African trade. Currently, trade among African nations remains relatively low compared to other regions. Divergent currencies and exchange rate risks act as significant barriers to trade. A unified currency would eliminate these obstacles, making it easier for African countries to engage in commerce with one another. This would not only foster economic growth but also reduce dependence on foreign markets, creating a more self-reliant and resilient continent.

Furthermore, an African Central Bank would provide a strong platform for financial integration. It could promote the development of a pan-African financial infrastructure, including a unified payment system and a more interconnected banking sector. This integration would enhance financial inclusion and access to banking services for millions of Africans who currently lack such access, thereby reducing poverty and inequality.

Beyond economic advantages, the creation of an African Central Bank would have profound political and diplomatic implications. African nations would have greater influence on the international stage, negotiating from a position of strength as a unified bloc. This could lead to more favorable trade agreements, enhanced cooperation on global issues such as climate change, and greater recognition of African interests in international forums.

Additionally, a continental central bank would promote regional political stability. By coordinating monetary policy, it could help prevent currency crises and financial instability, reducing the potential for conflicts driven by economic desperation. This newfound stability would also encourage foreign investment, leading to economic development and improved living conditions that often serve as catalysts for peace.

Critics may argue that creating an African Central Bank would involve significant challenges, from harmonizing fiscal policies to managing diverse economic conditions. While these challenges are real, they are not insurmountable. The European Union's experience with the euro, while not without its difficulties, demonstrates that a shared currency can be successful even among economically diverse nations.

Additionally, the African Union has already taken significant steps toward economic integration through initiatives like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). These efforts demonstrate a growing commitment to regional cooperation and provide a foundation upon which a central bank could be built.

It is also essential to consider the potential drawbacks and risks associated with the creation of an African Central Bank. One concern is that a single monetary policy may not effectively address the economic conditions of all African nations. Some countries may experience inflationary pressures, while others face deflationary risks. To mitigate this, the central bank would need to adopt a flexible approach, much like the European Central Bank's mandate, which aims to maintain price stability while considering the diverse economic conditions of Eurozone members.

Another risk is the potential for political interference in monetary policy. To ensure the independence and credibility of the central bank, strong governance structures and safeguards against political manipulation would be necessary. Transparency and accountability would be crucial in this regard.

Furthermore, the transition to a single currency could be disruptive, especially in countries with deeply entrenched monetary systems. Careful planning and gradual implementation would be essential to minimize any negative impacts on local economies.

In conclusion, the establishment of an African Central Bank holds great promise for the continent's economic development and political influence. While challenges and risks exist, the potential benefits are substantial, from enhanced economic stability and growth to increased political cooperation and sovereignty. A unified monetary authority could be the catalyst Africa needs to unlock its vast economic potential and play a more significant role on the global stage. Africa's journey towards a brighter economic future may well begin with the creation of its own central bank.

---

**Related reading**

- [Unlocking Prosperity: African Nations Embracing Digital Currencies](https://www.earlogarro.com/unlocking-prosperity-the-benefits-of-african-nations-embracing-digital-currencies/)
- [The Currency We Forfeited](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-currency-we-forfeited-1/)
### Unlocking Prosperity: The Benefits of African Nations Embracing Digital Currencies
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/unlocking-prosperity-the-benefits-of-african-nations-embracing-digital-currencies/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:57.000Z
![ Earl O’Garro Explains Benefits of Digital Currencies for African Nations](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e16d0c_a0d747d7240d480ab43f8b34459e8bbb~mv2.png)

Recent regime changes in Niger and Gabon should open our eyes to the reality that our naïve belief that Africa is a monolith is an incredibly dangerous position. Our generalized western conception of the needs and wants of countries in Africa has crashed violently against the reality that our American conception of “democracy” on its face is incredibly hypocritical and disconnected from the reality. Many countries on the continent of Africa are experiencing a tectonic shift politically, socially, and economically. It is my opinion that these shifts create a tremendous opportunity to allow the emergence of digital currencies as a disruptive force. While digital currencies have gained traction worldwide, their adoption in Africa presents unique opportunities and challenges. This blog explores the myriad benefits that African countries can reap by embracing digital currencies, ranging from financial inclusion and economic growth to enhanced security and reduced transaction costs.

1\. Financial Inclusion

One of the primary benefits of adopting digital currencies in Africa is the potential to foster financial inclusion. A significant portion of the African population remains unbanked or underbanked, lacking access to formal financial services. Digital currencies can bridge this gap by providing a low-cost, accessible means of transacting and saving. With a smartphone and an internet connection, individuals can participate in the digital economy, opening doors to financial services previously out of reach. There is a significant amount of data available that confirms that while many African households do not have stable internet or computers, many have smartphones which grant them access to the internet.

2\. Cross-Border Trade Facilitation

Africa's diverse economies engage in cross-border trade, often hindered by complex currency exchange processes and high fees. Digital currencies have the potential to simplify cross-border transactions, reducing currency conversion costs and eliminating the need for intermediaries. This streamlining of trade processes can boost intra-African commerce, stimulate economic growth, and enhance regional integration.

3\. Remittances

Remittances play a vital role in many African nations' economies, with millions of families depending on funds sent by relatives working abroad. Traditional remittance channels often impose high fees and lengthy delays. Digital currencies offer a faster and more cost-effective alternative, allowing recipients to receive funds in real-time with lower transaction costs, thus maximizing the value of remittances for recipients.

4\. Reduced Transaction Costs

Digital currencies can significantly reduce transaction costs associated with financial services. Traditional banking systems entail fees for services such as money transfers, bill payments, and account maintenance. In contrast, digital currencies, operating on decentralized blockchain technology, can cut out intermediaries, leading to substantial cost savings for both individuals and businesses.

5\. Enhanced Financial Transparency

One of the critical challenges facing African nations is corruption and financial mismanagement. Digital currencies can enhance transparency by providing a tamper-resistant, immutable ledger of all transactions. This transparency can deter corruption, improve accountability, and build trust in government and financial institutions. This also creates a comprehensive means for governmental entities to manage their tax bases effectively.

6\. Financial Innovation

The adoption of digital currencies can foster financial innovation in Africa. It can encourage the development of a wide range of fintech solutions, including digital wallets, peer-to-peer lending platforms, and blockchain-based supply chain solutions. These innovations can create new business opportunities, stimulate economic growth, and drive technological advancements.

7\. Monetary Policy and Inflation Control

In my opinion, this is probably one of the greatest advantages of digital currencies given the economic history on the continent. African countries often face challenges related to unstable currencies and high inflation rates. Digital currencies, especially those pegged to stable assets like fiat currencies or commodities (preserved and maintained on the continent), can provide a hedge against currency devaluation and inflation. Central banks can also use digital currencies to implement more effective monetary policy, thereby maintaining price stability and promoting economic growth.

8\. Access to Global Financial Markets

Digital currencies enable African nations to access global financial markets more easily. Traditional financial systems often restrict international investment opportunities due to regulatory barriers and high transaction costs. With digital currencies, individuals and businesses can access global investment opportunities and diversify their portfolios, potentially leading to higher returns on investments.

9\. Disaster Resilience

African countries are prone to natural disasters and crises that can disrupt traditional banking systems. Digital currencies, being decentralized and accessible via the internet, offer a more resilient means of preserving wealth and conducting transactions during emergencies. This resilience can help individuals and businesses recover more quickly from disasters.

10\. Security and Fraud Prevention

Digital currencies offer enhanced security features compared to traditional cash-based transactions. Blockchain technology, the backbone of most digital currencies, provides robust encryption and authentication mechanisms that can significantly reduce fraud and cybercrime. This increased security can protect individuals and businesses from financial losses and data breaches.

The adoption of digital currencies in African countries promises a multitude of benefits that extend from financial inclusion and economic growth to enhanced security and reduced transaction costs. By embracing this technological revolution, African nations can unlock vast economic potential, promote financial stability, and improve the lives of millions of people. However, it's essential to acknowledge that the successful implementation of digital currencies in Africa also requires addressing regulatory, cybersecurity, and infrastructure challenges. Nevertheless, the benefits far outweigh the challenges, making the adoption of digital currencies a compelling opportunity for the continent's future prosperity.

---

**Related reading**

- [Creating an African Central Bank: Unleashing Economic Potential](https://www.earlogarro.com/creating-an-african-central-bank-unleashing-economic-potential/)
- [The Currency We Forfeited](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-currency-we-forfeited-1/)
### Understanding Basel III: Strengthening Global Banking Resilience
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/understanding-basel-iii-strengthening-global-banking-resilience/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:57.000Z
![ Earl O’Garro talks about Basel III to Strengthen Global Banking Resilience
](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e16d0c_25a5fcde1966437c8fd66089ee04ef1f~mv2.jpg)

In the aftermath of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, policymakers and regulators recognized the need for enhanced stability and resilience in the banking sector. To address this, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) introduced Basel III, an international regulatory framework that aims to fortify the banking system by implementing stringent risk management and capital adequacy standards. In this post, we will delve into the key aspects of Basel III and understand its significance in safeguarding the global financial landscape.

One of the primary objectives of Basel III is to ensure that banks maintain a robust capital base. Capital acts as a financial buffer, protecting banks from unexpected losses and economic downturns. Basel III raises the minimum capital requirements for banks and establishes a more comprehensive definition of capital. By doing so, it strengthens the ability of banks to absorb losses, reducing the likelihood of more taxpayer-funded bailouts during financial crises.

Basel III implements a risk-based approach to determine the appropriate level of capital banks need to hold. Under this framework, assets are assigned risk weights based on their credit risk. Higher risk assets receive higher risk weights, requiring banks to hold more capital against them. This risk-sensitive approach ensures that banks are adequately capitalized to account for their individual risk profiles, promoting a more accurate assessment of capital adequacy.

Basel III introduces liquidity standards to address the liquidity risks faced by banks during times of financial stress. The Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) mandates banks to hold sufficient high-quality liquid assets to cover their projected net cash outflows over a 30-day stress period. This requirement enhances banks' ability to meet their short-term obligations, reducing the risk of liquidity crises.

To address the pro-cyclicality of the financial system, Basel III introduces a countercyclical capital buffer. During periods of excessive credit growth, national regulators can require banks to build up additional capital. This buffer can be released during economic downturns, helping banks continue lending and supporting economic activity.

The countercyclical buffer aims to strike a balance between supporting lending during economic contractions and ensuring that banks have enough capital to manage increased credit risk during periods of rapid economic growth. By managing the buffer appropriately, regulators can encourage prudent lending practices and help banks continue providing credit to businesses and individuals during challenging economic times, thereby contributing to economic stability and recovery. Personally, I believe this is one of the greatest lessons learned by policymakers following the 2007-2008 banking crisis.

The Basel III framework includes a leverage ratio that serves as a backstop to the risk-based capital requirements. The leverage ratio measures a bank's capital as a percentage of its total exposure, without taking into account risk weights. This provides a straightforward measure to limit excessive leverage and ensures banks maintain adequate capital relative to their overall size and risk.

Basel III represents a critical step in enhancing the stability and resilience of the global banking system. By mandating higher capital requirements, implementing risk-sensitive approaches, and addressing liquidity and leverage risks, Basel III aims to minimize the likelihood of financial crises and protect the financial landscape from systemic risks. With the majority of countries adopting the framework into their national banking regulations, Basel III continues to play a vital role in creating a safer and more secure financial environment for economies worldwide.

---

**Related reading**

- [Inflation Is a Choice: Notes on a Chairman's First Test](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-is-a-choice-notes-on-a-chairman-s-first-test/)
- [Managing Inflation and Consumer Confidence](https://www.earlogarro.com/managing-inflation-and-consumer-confidence/)
- [Inflation: The Externality of Generous Fiscal Policies](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-the-externality-of-generous-fiscal-policies/)
- [The Ledger That Will Not Lie](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-ledger-that-will-not-lie/)
### Inverted Yield Curves...So What?
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/inverted-yield-curves-so-what/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:56.000Z
![Inverted Yield Curves explained by  Earl O’Garro](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e16d0c_8004de0dd7714c91a6a39b6a51aba6e9~mv2.jpg)

I’ve been unapologetic in my critique of the Biden Administration’s fiscal response to inflation and equally critical of the Feds response by way of monetary policies. My opinion has not changed that the U.S. economy will be in full-fledged recession by the fall of 2023 and I’ve reached this conclusion by focusing on the commercial mortgage market as well as exploring recessionary signals like inverted yield curves. As I began my research for this piece, I was quite frankly shocked how little was written regarding yield curves and inversions of this economic signal. I expected more explanation and context but was fed word soup that confused me more than it helped me. I figured I wasn’t the only one that needed/wanted a clear understanding of not only the cause of the inversion of yield curves but a proper contextual understanding.

In the world of economics and finance, various indicators are closely monitored to gain insights into the state of the economy. One such indicator that has gained some attention is the inverted yield curve. We will explore how inverted yield curves typically signal an impending recession, analyzing the underlying mechanisms and historical evidence to support this correlation.

For context, “\[t\]he yield curve shows the interest rates that buyers of government debt demand in order to lend their money over various periods of time — whether overnight, for one month, 10 years or even 100 years… Because lending to governments in large developed economies such as the US, Germany, Japan and the UK is considered a safe bet, these borrowing rates are mostly influenced by investors’ assessment of the prospects for economic growth and inflation, and how those in turn will affect central bank interest rates.”[\[1\]](https://manage.wix.com/dashboard/b5df879a-35bd-4ea1-b067-c0ab34f83847/blog/b64e1482-97d4-47bd-b861-35a8d495e58d/edit?ref=earlogarro.com#%5Fftn1)

To comprehend the significance of an inverted yield curve, it is essential to first understand yield curves themselves. A yield curve is a graphical representation of the interest rates offered by bonds of varying maturities. Typically, longer-term bonds have higher yields than shorter-term bonds due to the additional risk associated with holding investments for an extended period. Think of a Certificate of Deposit (CD) that your grandmother told you to get with your summer earnings when you were in college. If you purchased a 3-Year CD the rate of return was higher than if you purchased a 6-Month CD, you benefited from entrusting your funds with the bank for a longer period of time.

Under normal economic conditions, the yield curve has an upward-sloping shape, indicating that long-term bonds have higher yields compared to short-term bonds. This reflects the expectation that investors should be compensated with higher returns for the increased risk of holding long-term investments. The normal yield curve suggests optimism about future economic prospects, as it implies that investors anticipate higher interest rates in the future.

In contrast, an inverted yield curve occurs when short-term bond yields surpass long-term bond yields. This phenomenon is often perceived as a strong warning sign of an impending economic recession. Historically, inverted yield curves have preceded most U.S. recessions over the past several decades, making them a crucial tool for economists and market participants.

**Reasons behind the Inverted Yield Curve's Recessionary Signal:**

1\. Expectations of Future Interest Rates: When investors anticipate a deteriorating economic outlook, they tend to shift their investments toward safer assets, such as long-term bonds, thereby increasing their demand. This increased demand for long-term bonds drives their prices higher and, in turn, lowers their yields. Consequently, the yield curve can invert as short-term bond yields rise due to the central bank's attempts to combat the economic slowdown by lowering interest rates.

2\. Uncertainty and Investor Pessimism: Inverted yield curves also reflect a general sense of uncertainty and pessimism in the market. Investors' flight to safer long-term bonds is driven by concerns about the future, such as weakening consumer spending, declining business investment, or geopolitical tensions (pick one: Ukraine, China, Taiwan, Democratic Republic of Congo). This pessimism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as reduced investment and spending can further exacerbate the economic downturn.

The historical relationship between inverted yield curves and recessions is notable. For instance, prior to the 2008 financial crisis, an inverted yield curve appeared in 2006, signaling an imminent recession. Similar patterns were observed before the early 1990s recession, the early 2000s dot-com bubble burst, and other economic downturns.

It is important to acknowledge that while inverted yield curves have often preceded recessions, they are not infallible predictors. There have been instances of false signals, such as brief yield curve inversions that did not result in significant economic downturns. Because I have those who will end up in my DM’s talking shit about how I didn’t mention those instances when inverted yield curves did not lead to recession and hang their hat on the fact that the U.S. economy has experienced yield curve inversions without a recession I’ve listed the instances where inverted yield curves did not lead to a recession. These two instances are notable…why?

1\. In 1998, the yield curve briefly inverted, with short-term rates exceeding long-term rates. However, a recession did not follow. Instead, the U.S. economy continued to expand, partly due to stimulative monetary policy and robust economic conditions at the time.

2\. In the mid-1960s, there was an episode of yield curve inversion, but it was followed by a period of sustained economic growth without a recession. This occurred as the Federal Reserve pursued expansionary monetary policy to stimulate the economy.

The proportional currency in circulation in 1998 and the 1960’s pale in comparison to the amount of currency in circulation now, because of COVID related policies. Another distinction between the economic realities of 1960s and 1998 is the existence of prolonged and persistent inflation. The amount of free-flowing capital that we have in our economy coupled with persistent inflation make the current economic conditions distinguishable from the 1960s and 1998.(The reasons here require a separate blog post, stick with me).

Inverted yield curves have long been regarded as a reliable indicator of forthcoming economic recessions. The inversion occurs due to investors' expectations of future interest rates and reflects their uncertainty and pessimism about the economy's prospects. While historical evidence supports the correlation between inverted yield curves and recessions, it is crucial to consider other economic factors for a comprehensive analysis. By monitoring these indicators and understanding their implications, economists and policymakers (none of the ones currently in office) can make informed decisions to mitigate the impact of economic downturns and promote stability and growth. Typically economic recession follows 15 months after prolonged inversion, that puts us at October 2023.

[\[1\]](https://manage.wix.com/dashboard/b5df879a-35bd-4ea1-b067-c0ab34f83847/blog/b64e1482-97d4-47bd-b861-35a8d495e58d/edit?ref=earlogarro.com#%5Fftnref1)An inverted yield curve: why investors are watching closely by Chelsea Bruce-Lockhart, Emma Lewis, and Tommy Stubbington. *Financial Times -* [*https://ig.ft.com/the-yield-curve-explained/*](https://ig.ft.com/the-yield-curve-explained/?ref=earlogarro.com)

---

**Related reading**

- [Inflation Is a Choice: Notes on a Chairman's First Test](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-is-a-choice-notes-on-a-chairman-s-first-test/)
- [Managing Inflation and Consumer Confidence](https://www.earlogarro.com/managing-inflation-and-consumer-confidence/)
- [Inflation: The Externality of Generous Fiscal Policies](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-the-externality-of-generous-fiscal-policies/)
- [The Ledger That Will Not Lie](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-ledger-that-will-not-lie/)
### The Gun Debate and America’s Obsession with AR-15s
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/the-gun-debate-and-america-s-obsession-with-ar-15s/
Last updated: 2026-07-17T01:47:01.000Z
![ Earl O’Garro's Opinion on The Gun Debate and America’s Obsession with AR-15s
](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e16d0c_9c14f24ded1f40908a7490fc528dedd7~mv2.png)

I would imagine for almost everyone else, their Friday night consists of DM’s asking how they intend to spend their impending holiday weekend; DM’s confirming plans or attempts to create new plans, but my DM’s consist of angry liberals accosting me for my views on gun ownership and 2nd Amendment rights in light of the tragic events in Uvalde, TX. Before I explain in great detail the framing issues that we have around guns in America I will give you an opportunity to stop reading. I will not delve too deeply into the fact that none of the officers that responded to the Uvalde, TX massacre elected to actually protect and serve by confronting the active shooter until Border Patrol agents showed up some time later; I will not spend much time addressing the fact that no amount or preparation or legislation will help if those tasked with the responsibilities fail to act. I will not delve too deeply into the media’s obsession with AR-15’s in the instant matter especially when anyone with the slightest common sense and basic understanding of firearms can deduce that anyone locked in a room for more than an hour with an AR-15 or a musket would likely yield the same outcome. Thus, the issue was not the choice of weapon but was perhaps the prepared response, or lack thereof. And it is this sort or portrayal by the media that I intend to address with the use of empirical data. You can go fold laundry, watch YouTube, scroll through your Instagram for the hundredth time for the day and put a heart next to every Uvalde, TX post and then go back to your activities of daily living…If this opening was difficult for you to read please do something other than read this because you’re likely not going to like what I have to say for no other reason than because it does not fit the current accepted narrative around our collective understanding of guns/firearms in this country.

On May 26, 2022 Vox published a number of misleading tweets but lets focus on this one in particular for a moment: “The mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, has once again brought American exceptionalism on gun violence into stark relief…Not one country compares to the US when it comes to the number of children killed inside its borders.” Yes, please ignore for a moment that the United States is the third largest country in the world and arguably the largest of the three with “reliable” statistical data. I have two simple points--one, countries with stricter gun laws yield higher rates of mass shootings per capita. Two, U.S. states with stricter gun laws yield higher rates of gun violence. The United States makes up approximately 1.15% of the worlds mass shootings while accounting for roughly 5% of the worlds population. Of the less than 100 countries around the world that have this data the United States comes in at 64thin frequency of mass shootings and 65th in murder rate. Stay with me.\[1\]

If we look at nations like France, Germany, Israel, Switzerland, Spain and Italy these are all great countries (according to the media), but all have 4 times as many individuals who die from mass shootings per capita and all significantly stricter gun control laws than the United States. One of the studies that I read utilized data over an eighteen-year period and this report (at the link below) came to the same conclusion that the U.S. is 64th in the world in terms of mass shooting rates per capita which sounds horrific, but you would have to observe the data and recognize the number of countries that elected not to report any data. I certainly have no intentions of damning the countries who elected not to produce or provide any statistics but its certainly a data point worth visiting. By global standards the U.S. is faring much better than most of the rest of the world as it relates to mass shootings per capita.

Washington, D.C., unsurprisingly has a murder rate of 21.8 per 100,000 people despite having the most restrictive gun laws in the country\[2\]. By contrast, Wyoming has the least restrictive gun laws, the highest gun ownership with a rate of 59.7% of households owning a firearm, and a murder rate of 1.4 per 100,000 people.\[3\] Admittedly, these numbers only tell part of the story but it is intuitive that the factors that contribute to DC having such a high rate of gun violence is part of a larger story of why the United States as a whole is quite deadly, but this data does not support the media’s notion that included in the story are factors pertaining to high gun ownership or lack of gun regulation. If in fact stricter gun regulations yielded reduced gun violence, then we would expect to see states with stricter gun laws to have lower rates of gun violence but instead we see the opposite happening. I can see the DM’s in my inbox now “well yeah, they enacted stricter gun laws because they had significant gun violence”, this may in fact be true and let me clarify what may be true. It may be true that these cities enacted stricter gun laws in response to rises in gun violence, but the stricter gun laws did not yield reductions in gun violence in these cities.\[4\] Don’t take my word for it check it for yourself…ignore the political parties running these cities, that is perhaps a conversation for another day.

Like you, I’m sick and tired of hearing about the loss of innocent lives, especially those of children. Rattling off statistics about how we murder each other more or less than some other nation is no relief for a grieving mother, father, brother or sister. But shame on the media for framing this issue so improperly and insensitively. Like you, I support universal background checks, I support reform that targets straw buyers and criminalizes their behavior. If you are truly against AR-15s and their use or believe that we need stricter gun laws across the board then do a better job of messaging and identifying your issues and make them more palatable because pro-gun groups are framing and controlling this issue without much resistance according to Vox, “Mass Shootings Typically Lead to Looser Guns Laws, Not Stronger Ones\[5\]. It isn’t enough to simply be upset and DM me, I am not a legislator and I am unapologetically pro-Second Amendment rights, hard stop. All of these calls for a ban on firearms is an absurd response especially when it does not square the facts in the instant case in Uvalde, TX. If you truly want gun reform, and you want it fast, you and your friends each need to convince four to five Black men that you know to lawfully obtain their concealed carry permits or other permits necessary to carry a firearm and you will get Operation Warp Speed Gun Reform before year end…It is because of this very fact why we need to fight tirelessly to protect the right to bear arms, even if they are AR-15s.

**\[1\]** Comparing the Global Rate of Mass Public Shootings to the U.S.’s Rate and Comparing Their Changes Over Time - [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=3289010](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=3289010&ref=earlogarro.com) \[2\] District of Columbia Gun Control Laws - [https://www.findlaw.com/state/dc-law/district-of-columbia-gun-control-laws.html](https://www.findlaw.com/state/dc-law/district-of-columbia-gun-control-laws.html?ref=earlogarro.com) \[3\] Wyoming Gun Control Laws - [https://www.findlaw.com/state/wyoming-law/wyoming-gun-control-laws.html](https://www.findlaw.com/state/wyoming-law/wyoming-gun-control-laws.html?ref=earlogarro.com) \[4\] Murder Map: U.S. Deadliest Cities - [https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-cities/](https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-cities/?ref=earlogarro.com) \[5\] Mass Shootings Typically Lead to Looser Gun Laws - [https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23142829/uvalde-robb-elementary-mass-shooting-gun-politcal-science](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23142829/uvalde-robb-elementary-mass-shooting-gun-politcal-science?ref=earlogarro.com)

Photo by RYON HORNE / AJC <%28https://www.ajc.com/news/local/opinion-public-gun-toting-black-and-white/xZHLZM6yAmUoSGI4XTjrgI/>)
### Inflation: The Externality of Generous Fiscal Policies
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-the-externality-of-generous-fiscal-policies/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:55.000Z
![ Earl O’Garro's Guide on Inflation and The Externality of Generous Fiscal Policies
](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e16d0c_b0791c853585469d8fc159187024b878~mv2.jpeg)

Over the span of Mr. Biden’s presidency, he has been forced to confront the ugly realities that come with generous fiscal initiatives: inflation. While many hope to make the debate around inflation a partisan issue, it seems more appropriate to relegate sentiments surrounding inflation to understanding the true economic goals of the U.S. economy in both the short and long term. Admittedly, I have some bias as a self-described Moderate Conservative, but the reality is that regardless of the fiscal or monetary policies that followed the massive economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ultimate result of these actions (or inactions) will either yield increases in inflation, increases in unemployment, increases in prices or combinations of these outcomes due to the significant inflow of capital into the U.S. equity markets. Ultimately, we are left to decide, which pill we will choose, but we must choose one, or a jumble of a few. This is not to say or to excuse the fact that the Biden Administration’s fiscal initiatives have exacerbated an already challenging moment in our history.

The beginning of this year brought many discussions from economists on whether the U.S. economy was beginning to overheat. The concern was, and still is, that core inflation is rising because of substantial increases in real GDP and declining unemployment; none of this should come as a surprise. An overheating economy is often characterized as rising inflation rates and low unemployment rates. Using the Aggregate Demand/Aggregate Supply (AD/AS) model to illustrate this scenario one would presume that monetary policies were put in place for the purpose of driving down the federal funds rate. As a potential consequence, in the short run there would be an increase in real GDP and an increase in prices. In the long run there would just be an increase in prices. This would result in an almost immediate AD shift to the right shortly followed by an AS shift to the left in hopes of reaching long run equilibrium. \[1\]

Under the assumption both inflation and unemployment rates continue to rise then there would likely need to be a shift in both monetary and fiscal policy. A potential solution to the inflation issue would be to reverse course and increase interest rates however by doing so, this may exacerbate the unemployment issues because the “cost” of adding additional staff would be higher for employers. An alternative would be to continue to reduce interest rates in hopes that the increase in real GDP could result in more output and more employment. Lastly, government or fed officials could enact zero monetary and fiscal changes and allow the economy to correct on its own over time.

In an article Titled “Is The U.S. Economy Recovering or Overheating”\[2\], Delong makes a few important points, and we reach the same ultimate conclusion, he writes: “Moreover, the US economy is emerging from the pandemic recession with a fundamentally altered inter-sectoral balance. Spending on [durable goods](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEDG?ref=earlogarro.com) currently accounts for an additional 1.7 percentage points of GDP, relative to its 2019 level, and spending on [housing construction](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MPCTXXXXS?ref=earlogarro.com) is running at 0.5 points above its 2019 share. At the same time, [business spending on structures](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MPCT03XXS?ref=earlogarro.com) and [consumer spending on energy](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DNRGRC1M027SBEA?ref=earlogarro.com#0) are both running at 0.5 points below their 2019 shares, and spending on services (hospitality, recreation, and transportation) is [2.2 points below its 2019 share](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DPCERAM1M225NBEA?ref=earlogarro.com). These sectoral dynamics will be the most important determinants of inflation this year. By the end of 2021, [some 4% of all workers](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTUTSR?ref=earlogarro.com) will have moved not only to new jobs but to entirely different sectors. In an economy where businesses very rarely cut nominal wages, the pull of workers from sectors where demand is relatively slack to sectors where it is more intense will require firms to offer wage increases to encourage workers to make the jump. But we cannot know how much inflation this reshuffling will cause, because we have not really seen anything like it before. Economists will have a lot to learn this year about the short-term intersectoral elasticity of employment supply. One thing that should be clear, however, is that an uptick of inflation this year is nothing to be upset about. After all, wage and price increases are an essential part of rebalancing the economy. Real production, real wages, and real asset values will all be higher as a result of this year’s inflation, whereas the price level will remain far below what it would have been had the Fed managed to hit its inflation targets in the years since the Great Recession following the 2008 global financial crisis.”

Some weeks ago, I wrote the Fed should reduce its asset purchases which would result in a reduction of free-flowing cash into the U.S. economy, and I believed then, as I believe now, that this action and strategy, although initially painful, would yield the best long-term results and would protect both domestic and foreign capital markets and provide companies with more long-term certainty which would naturally stabilize markets and consumer sentiment over time. I also believed then, as I do now, that the concerns around inflation although real, were a function of market corrections that our economy needed to accept the brunt force of now, rather than during say a looming presidential election.

Edward Abbey perhaps summarizes it best when he said, “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” What we are experiencing now, fortunate, or unfortunately, is the cost associated with living in a society that is inextricably tied to both consumption and production. Free-flowing capital together with prolonged stay at home orders have real consequences and now we are on the uncomfortable path of correcting what appear to be, our pathological ways.

**\[1\]Aggregate Supply and Aggregate Demand Explanation - https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/macroeconomics/aggregate-supply-demand-topic/macro-equilibrium-in-the-ad-as-model/a/test-article-ii** **\[2\] J. Bradford Delong - https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-inflation-shows-economy-is-reshuffling-and-recovering-by-j-bradford-delong-2021-05**

---

**Related reading**

- [Inflation Is a Choice: Notes on a Chairman's First Test](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-is-a-choice-notes-on-a-chairman-s-first-test/)
- [Managing Inflation and Consumer Confidence](https://www.earlogarro.com/managing-inflation-and-consumer-confidence/)
- [The Ledger That Will Not Lie](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-ledger-that-will-not-lie/)
- [The Dollar Remembers What We Forget](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-dollar-remembers-what-we-forget/)
### Managing Inflation and Consumer Confidence
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/managing-inflation-and-consumer-confidence/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:54.000Z
WSJ Article Title: Fed Chairman Powell Navigates the Inflation Debate\[1\]

![Learn How to Manage Inflation and Consumer Confidence with Earl O’Garro
](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e16d0c_82d8734b623b42c28aef76275beec1b2~mv2.jpg)

On August 23, 2021 the Wall Street Journal published an article titled, *Fed Chairman Powell Navigates the Inflation Debate*, the writers describe how Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, was stuck in an unusually difficult position because of the unexpected global pandemic that ravaged both domestic and foreign capital markets and the emergence of the Delta Variant following extended stay at home orders issued by the U.S. Government in response to the Coronavirus outbreak. Chairman Powell had to confront whether to walk back a prior directive he issued approximately a year prior to the start of the global pandemic,\[2\] which instructed U.S. Central Banks to keep interest rates lower for much longer because of a preceding decade long period of low growth and inflation. Many the board members of the federal reserve had differing perspectives on the actions the Federal Reserve should take in response to the Delta Variant and the possibility of additional lockdowns and stay at home orders.

The Federal Reserve is tasked with two primary functions: (1) Promote maximum employment and (2) Stabilize prices (i.e. steadying inflation and moderating long-term interest rates). The Federal Reserve can quickly implement monetary changes that affect the nominal money supply which is a fancy way of saying “the affect of more money in the economic system”. By affecting the amount of money in the economic system, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies can increase disposable income, increase consumer spending, and increase real Gross Domestic Product rather quickly. Conversely, fiscal policies or changes are a bit more arduous and take considerably more time to implement due to the number of decision-makers required—House of Representatives and Senators—as a result, fiscal changes take much longer and often times cannot be implemented quickly to address the needs of the economy.

Chairman Powell, was forced to confront the best path forward to ensure that consumers faith in the economy remained high while still managing potential rises in inflation. At the time of publication of this article there were two divergent views in terms of plans of action: 1) Some central bank officials believed recent price increases in consumer goods would correct on its own over time which would allow the Federal Reserve to stick to its pre-pandemic plan; 2) Other central bank officials believed that the increases in the prices of consumer goods signaled that high inflation was here to stay for some period and as a result central banks needed to consider raising interest rates much sooner and more aggressively than initially anticipated. Chairman Powell concluded that staying the course with his initial plan—allowing high prices to correct on their own over time—during this unprecedented time was the best course of action to manage inflation.

August Job's report, which showed virtually zero net change in leisure and hospitality sectors amplifies the economic affects of the Delta Variant. As a result, any plans the Fed had to taper its bond/asset purchases would need to be placed on a brief hold. What's interesting here, is while the Fed may have reached its ultimate goal of leveling inflation around the 2% mark by the end of summer, the Fed must now weigh how to compute the net affect of the Delta Variant stretching into the fall months as hospitalizations and new infections rise while also weighing the net affects of the supply chain disruptions that existed prior to the Delta Variant. As unpopular as this may sound, the Fed should begin tapering its asset purchases now and allow the resilience of the U.S. economy to shine.

Mr. Biden's disastrous strategy in Afghanistan together with low approval ratings makes clear that any and all consumer confidence will come by way of decisions made by the Fed. Peel the bandaid off, let the wound heal with a bit of air and sunlight...it works every other time.

\[1\] Wall Street Journal - https://www.wsj.com/articles/fed-chairman-powell-navigates-the-inflation-debate-11629730921?st=ntwro9j9ih1cudg&reflink=article\_email\_share \[2\] COVID- 19 Emergency Declaration – FEMA - [https://www.fema.gov/press-release/20210318/covid-19-emergency-declaration](https://www.fema.gov/press-release/20210318/covid-19-emergency-declaration?ref=earlogarro.com)

Photo Credit: Reuters - [https://www.reuters.com/business/fed-chair-powells-big-moment-3-ways-he-could-play-it-2021-08-27/](https://www.reuters.com/business/fed-chair-powells-big-moment-3-ways-he-could-play-it-2021-08-27/?ref=earlogarro.com)

---

**Related reading**

- [Inflation Is a Choice: Notes on a Chairman's First Test](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-is-a-choice-notes-on-a-chairman-s-first-test/)
- [Inflation: The Externality of Generous Fiscal Policies](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-the-externality-of-generous-fiscal-policies/)
- [The Ledger That Will Not Lie](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-ledger-that-will-not-lie/)
- [The Dollar Remembers What We Forget](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-dollar-remembers-what-we-forget/)
### Earl O'Garro Files Grievance Complaint Against Attorney Andrew Crumbie
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/earl-o-garro-files-grievance-complaint-against-attorney-andrew-crumbie/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:59.000Z
\*\*Here is a copy of the press release that was sent in May 2017 along with a copy of the complaint that was filed\*\*

![Earl O'Garro Files Grievance Complaint Against Attorney Andrew Crumbie for  attorney misconduct 
](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e16d0c_a10f9902ac8945e685f5a0b3d1334cde~mv2.jpg)

HARTFORD -- On May 12, 2017, Earl O'Garro, Jr., ex-President and Chief Executive Officer of Hybrid Insurance Group, who was convicted of wire and mail fraud, after a one week jury trial in December 2015, relating to misappropriated funds from the City of Hartford, filed a motion in federal court in Hartford for bond pending appeal. O'Garro alleges in his filings that city lawyer, Andrew Crumbie, was working both as government informant as well as counsel for O'Garro, pre-trial. O'Garro contends, under penalty of perjury, that Crumbie was sharing defense strategies with the government, as well as providing information to the government on matters O'Garro did not want to cooperate with the government in regards to. Namely, ongoing public corruption investigations in City Hall. O'Garro alleges in his filings which are currently uncontested by the government, that on multiple occasions the government, through ex-AUSA Christopher Mattei, asked O'Garro to cooperate on pending investigations. O'Garro alleges that Crumbie facilitated the meetings between O'Garro and the government, but O'Garro did not trust Mattei and as a result elected not to cooperate. O'Garro further alleges that prior to sentencing, while leaving federal court in Hartford, that staff of the court house pulled him aside and advised him that Crumbie recently had proceedings in the same courthouse. This staff member went on to add that Crumbie was under investigation by federal law enforcement while representing O'Garro. O'Garro asserts that he notified his trial counsel, Deirdre Murray, and Tracy Hayes. Murray reached out to AUSA Michael Gustafson who did not provide an affirmative response. O'Garro now contends that the court records need to be amended to include his claim of ineffective assistance of counsel and due process violations. In other proceedings in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, O'Garro raises the same issues through a motion for remand, which is currently pending in that Court. In filings submitted by the government to the Second Circuit, in sum the government does not address the claims raised by O'Garro but argues that O'Garro should raise that issue at a subsequent legal proceeding, not during his direct appeal.

On June 21, 2017, Crumbie, discovering the public filings made by O'Garro in the federal court, sent a scathing email to O'Garro's appellate counsel, Tina Schneider, from the Law Offices of Tina Schneider in Portland, ME, stating in sum that he did not represent O'Garro ever in the criminal matters dating back to 2013, and Crumbie stated that he was never under investigation by "any government or law enforcement". Crumbie's claims directly contradict emails Crumbie himself forwarded in September 2016 to O'Garro's appellate counsel. One email in particular, dated May 15, 2014 from ex-AUSA Christopher Mattei, evinces conversation where Mattei is negotiating plea terms with Crumbie. Two weeks later, a May 28, 2014 email from Crumbie to Mattei shows Crumbie saying "at this junction, I will likely pull out of the representation", in response to a conversation that he alleges he had with O'Garro relating to legal fees. O'Garro asserts, that Crumbie created this false issue with legal fees once Crumbie was advised that O'Garro was unwilling to accept a plea agreement and preferred to go to trial. Mattei then asks Crumbie, in the same email thread dated May 28, 2014, whether Crumbie could "at least get \[O'Garro\] through the plea", Crumbie responds in short that he may be able to do that.

Filings made to the statewide grievance board, by O'Garro, allege that Crumbie had purposefully mislead an officer of the court for purposes of concealing his dual role as both government informant and attorney, also include a copy of the plea agreement offered to O'Garro in May 2014, by the government, and through O'Garro's representative, Andrew Crumbie. On the initial page of the agreement it clearly shows the client as O'Garro and his counsel as Crumbie Law Group which contradicts the statements made by Crumbie to O'Garro's appellate counsel on June 21, 2017\. The same filings made to the grievance board also references emails turned over by Crumbie, after the May 28, 2014 email where Crumbie states that he will have to pull out of his representation--these emails are between Mattei, Crumbie and FBI Special Agent Daniel O'Brien--Mattei is trying to set a conference call between the three. Interestingly, Crumbie turned these July 2014 emails over to O'Garro's appellate counsel after she requested all correspondence that Crumbie had in his possession, between him and the government relating to O'Garro. Initial review of the July emails show no reference to O'Garro, the prior May emails referenced O'Garro in the subject line of each email, the July emails did not include any reference to O'Garro, yet Crumbie provided them when asked to turn over all correspondence related to O'Garro. It is not immediately clear based on the email exchanges obtained why, Crumbie, who stated that he will have to end his representation in May of 2014, is coordinating a conference call with the AUSA and FBI.

Judge Thompson has ordered the government to respond to O'Garro's motion for bond by July 14 and O'Garro must respond to the government's submission by July 21st. O'Garro is requesting a hearing date on or before July 31.

---

**Related reading**

- [Haiti In Disarray](https://www.earlogarro.com/haiti-in-disarray/)
- [Where Is the Red Cross and the Half-Billion Dollars It Collected?](https://www.earlogarro.com/where-is-the-red-cross-and-the-half-billion-dollars-it-collected/)
- [Corrupticut: The Place Where Justice Goes To Die](https://www.earlogarro.com/corrupticut-the-place-where-justice-goes-to-die/)
- [Dirty Hands](https://www.earlogarro.com/dirty-hands/)
### Corrupticut: The Place Where Justice Goes To Die
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/corrupticut-the-place-where-justice-goes-to-die/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:59.000Z
I will not spend too much time re-stating what is contained in the attachment. Read and let's discuss, much of this will become relevant very shortly.

![O'Garro's Connecticut Federal Case Filing Report](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e16d0c_69735d8de9074f719eefb68dd114fcad~mv2.jpg)

---

**Related reading**

- [Haiti In Disarray](https://www.earlogarro.com/haiti-in-disarray/)
- [Where Is the Red Cross and the Half-Billion Dollars It Collected?](https://www.earlogarro.com/where-is-the-red-cross-and-the-half-billion-dollars-it-collected/)
- [Earl O'Garro Files Grievance Complaint Against Attorney Andrew Crumbie](https://www.earlogarro.com/earl-o-garro-files-grievance-complaint-against-attorney-andrew-crumbie/)
- [Dirty Hands](https://www.earlogarro.com/dirty-hands/)
### WHERE IS THE RED CROSS AND THE HALF-BILLION DOLLARS IT COLLECTED?
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/where-is-the-red-cross-and-the-half-billion-dollars-it-collected/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:59.000Z
![Analysis by Earl O’Garro on American red cross disaster relief missing funds after Haiti’s Port-Au-Prince Earthquake](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e16d0c_6cd51918ff6e45c3900b12a1f36af851~mv2.png)

---

August 17, 2021

TrueNewsReport

By: Nathaniel Ballantyne

**New York City** – Natural disaster is a good business, and no one knows this better than the Red Cross, a nonprofit organization with over a hundred years of experience. In 2010 a devastating earthquake struck Port-Au-Prince killing over three hundred thousand people. The world was shocked and sprung into action. The Red Cross quickly set up hotlines and television commercials seeking donations, and within a few days, millions of dollars of donations from Americans, including Haitian diaspora, poured in. I gave the Red Cross 250 dollars, which was the last time I made such a donation. Overall, the Red Cross collected 589 million dollars.

With that kind of money, most people thought that the Red Cross would use the money to help the victims. And there were so many ways that the Red Cross could have helped. They could have built clinics or hospitals and built houses for the victims who lost everything in the earthquake. They could have worked with the anemic Haitian government to build schools. But, instead, the CEO of the Red Cross and her acolytes sent executives to Haiti as part of a recovery mission to do nothing but to drive around in air-conditioned SUVs drinking and having a grand ole time.

Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers of the Red Cross, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success. For example, the Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti was just six. Yes, six homes!

After the 2010 earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious plans to "[develop brand-new](http://www.press.org/news-multimedia/news/red-cross-chief-executive-outlines-haiti-relief?ref=earlogarro.com) communities." None have ever been built. She lied to the people of Haiti and ran with the money like a bandit.

Aid organizations worldwide have struggled after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country. But ProPublica and [NPR's](http://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-red-cross-500-million-in-haiti-relief?ref=earlogarro.com) investigation shows that many of the Red Cross's failings in Haiti are of its own making. They are also part of a larger pattern in which the organization has botched aid delivery after disasters such as [Superstorm Sandy](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-red-cross-secret-disaster?ref=earlogarro.com). Yet, despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the [charity](http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/04/27/apple-restarts-itunes-red-cross-donations-to-benefit-nepal-earthquake-recovery?ref=earlogarro.com) [of choice](https://www.amazon.com/b/ref=br%5Fimp?%5Fencoding=UTF8&node=1297793011&pf%5Frd%5Fm=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf%5Frd%5Fs=desktop-sidekick-1&pf%5Frd%5Fr=0DXCPA39RJC77T2323V8&pf%5Frd%5Ft=36701&pf%5Frd%5Fp=2085823942&pf%5Frd%5Fi=desktop&ref=earlogarro.com) for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters. One issue that has hindered the Red Cross's work in Haiti is an overreliance on foreigners who could not speak French or Creole, current and former employees say, which is why the USAID should not rely on foreigners but on Haitians and members of the Haitian Diaspora.

In a blistering 2011 memo, the then-director of the Haiti program, Judith St. Fort, wrote that the group [was failing](https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/2081560-red-cross-haiti-program-director-judith-st-fort.html?ref=earlogarro.com) in Haiti and that senior managers had made ["very disturbing" remarks](https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/2081560-red-cross-haiti-program-director-judith-st-fort.html?ref=earlogarro.com) disparaging Haitian employees. St. Fort, who is Haitian American, wrote that the comments included, "he is the only hard working one among them" and "the ones that we have hired are not strong, so we probably should not pay close attention to Haitian CVs." The Red Cross won't disclose how it has spent the hundreds of millions of dollars donated for Haiti. But our reporting shows that less money reached those in need than the Red Cross has said.

Lacking the expertise to mount its own projects, the Red Cross ended up giving much of the money to other groups to do the work. Those groups took a piece of every dollar to cover overhead and management. Even on the projects done by others, the Red Cross had its own significant expenses – in one case, adding up to a third of the project's budget.

With the new earthquake that struck Haiti in the Southwestern part of Haiti on Saturday, August 14, 2021, the Red Cross can correct its mistakes by providing aid to the victims. This time, the Red Cross should build the houses that it promised the Haitian people in 2010.

Article originally appeared on - [https://truenewsblog.com/where-is-the-red-cross-and-the-half-billion-dollars-they-collected-on-behalf-of-earthquake-victims-in-2010-the-people-of-haiti-need-that-money-now/](https://truenewsblog.com/where-is-the-red-cross-and-the-half-billion-dollars-they-collected-on-behalf-of-earthquake-victims-in-2010-the-people-of-haiti-need-that-money-now/?ref=earlogarro.com)

Photo Credit: Al Jazeera News - [https://www.aljazeera.com](https://www.aljazeera.com/?ref=earlogarro.com)

---

**Related reading**

- [Haiti In Disarray](https://www.earlogarro.com/haiti-in-disarray/)
- [Corrupticut: The Place Where Justice Goes To Die](https://www.earlogarro.com/corrupticut-the-place-where-justice-goes-to-die/)
- [Earl O'Garro Files Grievance Complaint Against Attorney Andrew Crumbie](https://www.earlogarro.com/earl-o-garro-files-grievance-complaint-against-attorney-andrew-crumbie/)
- [Dirty Hands](https://www.earlogarro.com/dirty-hands/)
### Critical Race Theory: The Ugly Truth
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/critical-race-theory-the-ugly-truth/
Last updated: 2026-07-16T23:47:44.000Z
I told myself a few months back, when I heard the term ‘Critical Race Theory’ (CRT), that I was going to leave the subject alone and focus on other subjects like the militarization of the police, or criminal justice reform. Against my better judgement, I elected to dive a bit deeper and try to understand why my fellow Republicans were up in arms about this notion of effectively teaching children in American schools’ history that is encompassing of a racialized perspective for the purpose of providing a more accurate historical context. I embarked on this journey to understand CRT by reading what some of the leading voices and “intellectuals” on the subject had to say. I settled on the definition/working understanding of CRT provided by Princeton University Professor Imani Perry. In an interview with Marc Lamont Hill, Dr. Perry defines CRT by saying “It’s not enough to be colorblind we actually have to be able to address injustice and subordination if we are going to have legal racial equality, that’s the heart of Critical Race Theory...how to think about law, legislation, and policies that will substantively respond to racial inequality…A way of understanding the mechanics of racial inequality and how the law might be imagined to address them.” \[1\] It is against this backdrop that I began to listen to the perspective offered by Republicans in opposition to teacher’s unions throughout the country teaching CRT in schools.

Leading conservative voices contend, in summation, that CRT teaches that white people are inherently racist just for being white and that America is an inherently racist country. Days ago, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell stated while in Murray, Kentucky “CRT is divisive, radical and utterly debunked. It uses lies about our founding to divide us; teaches kids the color of our skin defines us. The federal government should protect taxpayer dollars from being used to promote the 1619 Project and critical race theory, which is why I support the Saving of America’s History Act which was introduced by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas.”\[2\] Search after search yielded similar results—articles by “conservatives” asserting that CRT was horrible and that taxpayer funds shouldn’t be used to teach racism or mistruths. So much of this rhetoric sounded familiar so I began to look back at articles and commentary written last summer when there were debates concerning the removal of statutes and monuments. One article in particular stood out. Hunter Derensis wrote in his article titled “Saving Christopher Columbus From Cultural Arsonists” that “Past generations of Americans understood greatness and why it’s commendable, unlike the thankless iconoclasts of today. Paying homage to the men and women of the past is about recognizing and appreciating extraordinary feats. The grandeur of Columbus is succinctly encapsulated by 1970s comedian and television host Flip Wilson. “As a kid, my idol—and he’s still my idol—of all the great American heroes, my idol is Christopher Columbus,” Wilson jovially [told](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6RQEhUYTuQ&t&ref=earlogarro.com) a comedy club audience. “What a great thing that was, discovering America. I wouldn’t have found it. I don’t know where you people would have been, I wouldn’t have found it.”\[3\] Derensis’ article properly encapsulates the rationale supporting the necessity of CRT.

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s legal scholars created an academic approach to critique and analyze American institutions and laws through a lens of race and racism. Notions of CRT have been around for decades in post-graduate institutions. Recently however, conservatives and conservative media have co-opted this term and are using it as a catch-all way of describing anything that relates to race or racism. As a result, conversations pertaining to white supremacy, white privilege, conversations concerning anti-racism have been improperly tagged as “Critical Race Theory”. But why? Why have my fellow Republicans used CRT as a dog whistle to suggest some sort of reverence to education while raising zero objections to articles written like Hunter Derensis, where blatant factually untrue statements are made? There were whole civilizations of people living on what later became known as North America well before Christopher Columbus arrived and slaughtered most of them. This notion that white Americans can pick and choose narratives and pick and choose which narratives to perpetuate and how these narratives are perpetuated gets at the marrow of the CRT debate. It is because of the racialized perspective that creates this dichotomy of “saved” and “savior” which more times than not--within a Western conception of what it means to be both human and American--paints whites as the “savior” through their “discoveries” of uninhabited lands and thus makes the institutions that are used to conduct this “saving” vessels of liberation and equality rather than what they actually are—Trojan horses used to maintain white hegemony.

It would seem that the conservative response to CRT is grossly misplaced. If in fact, the overarching concern is what little Susie and little Ronnie will learn in school, then the concern should be less focused on what is “right” or what is “wrong” but instead focused on what is true. The forefathers of the United States of America understood when articulating the rights endowed to each citizen that the goal then (and now) was in fact to make America a “more perfect union”. The ability to make America more perfect rested on the belief that they understood that the union was not perfect at the time but through justice, domestic tranquility, promotion of the general welfare we as Americans could in fact form a union that was more perfect than the union that previously existed but the forefathers knew then that what was right and what was wrong paled in comparison to valuing and understanding what was true. The effort feverishly exerted by conservatives and my fellow republicans to prevent or obstruct the teaching of CRT in our schools speaks directly to their unwillingness to confront the very mechanisms that necessitate the need for CRT. Said differently, if conservatives and republicans fought this feverishly against white supremacy, institutional racism and a list of other -isms then this would obviate the need for Critical Race Theory.

I will end this with a quote from my favorite author, James Baldwin. Hopefully my fellow republicans will get an understanding of this and focus on what is true rather than what they believe is right or wrong.

“For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.”

**\[1\]** Princeton Professor Explains Critical Race Theory w/ Marc Lamont Hill - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2KL8oHxW8A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2KL8oHxW8A&ref=earlogarro.com)

\[2\] Saving Us From Critical Race Theory - [https://www.murrayledger.com/opinion/saving-us-from-critical-race-theory/article\_b376be1e-e03f-11eb-b40c-63f028bf0ef8.html](https://www.murrayledger.com/opinion/saving-us-from-critical-race-theory/article%5Fb376be1e-e03f-11eb-b40c-63f028bf0ef8.html?ref=earlogarro.com)

\[3\] Saving Christopher Columbus -

[https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/saving-christopher-columbus-from-the-cultural-arsonists/](https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/saving-christopher-columbus-from-the-cultural-arsonists/?ref=earlogarro.com)

Photo Credit: New York Times - [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/us/politics/critical-race-theory.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/us/politics/critical-race-theory.html?ref=earlogarro.com)
### Haiti In Disarray
URL: https://www.earlogarro.com/haiti-in-disarray/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T01:40:58.000Z
Admittedly, back in May of this year I dragged my feet in writing about Haiti and its disarray. With the benefit of hindsight, I acknowledge that my trepidation was rooted almost exclusively in my belief that things would ultimately get worse so I would wait until then to share my thoughts, I figured I had a little bit of time. In full disclosure, my views shared herein should be considered alongside the fact that in in late 2020 I was asked to assist in the Presidential election of a candidate who would run in opposition to President Jovenel, but even I did not expect what came later.

On July 7, 2021 President Jovenel Moise’s private home was “ambushed” by individuals professing to be part of the U.S. Government’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)--none of President Moise’s security harmed--but the First Lady of Haiti lay riddled with bullets and President Moise lay dead beside her, assassinated by who the Associated Press and a number of other news outlets claim to be Colombian nationals hired by a private security firm.

Never mind any of the blaring issues related to the assassination of President Moise right now…Yes I’m asking you to ignore the fact that none of President Moise’s security was shot at much less injured. I am asking you to ignore news reports that someone yelled “DEA” before initiating the home invasion of a head of state in a country where we are being asked to believe by news outlets and government officials that yelling “DEA” in the late night in a predominately Creole speaking upscale city in Haiti is the equivalent--for all intents of purposes--of yelling “DEA” in the middle of the night in say Detroit, Michigan. Suspend all desire to resolve these inconsistencies in advance of being able digest the implications of President Moise’s assination on the Haitian people and its government.

Prior to President Moise’s death, conservative reports estimate that more than 40% of Haiti’s citizens were food insecure, i would venture to believe this figure has not improved as a result of Moise's assassination. Combine food insecurity issues with the social unrest and Haiti becomes the quintessential powder-keg on the brink of civil war. As articulated by Chalmers Larose, “Internally, [Haiti has been weakened](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jul/19/guns-gangs-and-bad-aid-haitis-crisis-reaches-full-throttle?ref=earlogarro.com) for many years by a deep social and political breakdown, a deterioration of the economic and humanitarian situation and a generalized pattern of violence that has eroded the entire social and environmental fabric of the country.

When the health risks exacerbated by the [COVID-19 pandemic](https://apnews.com/article/business-health-pandemics-coronavirus-pandemic-haiti-0b632dd3dab61f9a76059860a158ef12?ref=earlogarro.com) are combined with the increased capacity of armed violence by organized gangs and the total collapse of Haiti’s armed forces, the result is an explosive cocktail waiting for a spark.”[\[1\]](applewebdata://6E601F10-FADB-4FCE-9164-BC1A8613C690#%5Fftn1)

Perhaps it is not appropriate to point fingers at this moment and this is not an attempt to do just that, but is it unreasonable to ask what hand the U.S. government as well as the French government played in perpetuating circumstances that allowed for Haiti to exist in this state of perpetual instability? My question is not an attempt to absolve the Haitian government of responsibility but Haiti did not arrive at this place of civil instability and food insecurity on its own. Indisputably Haiti is in disarray, but when are we going to have an honest conversation on the “how” and “why”?

[\[1\]](applewebdata://6E601F10-FADB-4FCE-9164-BC1A8613C690#%5Fftnref1) **The crisis in Haiti reflects the failure of the international community to stabilize the country - https://theconversation.com/the-crisis-in-haiti-reflects-the-failure-of-the-international-community-to-stabilize-the-country-164613**

![News and insights about crises in Haiti by Earl O’Garro](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e16d0c_07dea5203e1b4369ac21397427d37c60~mv2.jpg)

---

**Related reading**

- [Where Is the Red Cross and the Half-Billion Dollars It Collected?](https://www.earlogarro.com/where-is-the-red-cross-and-the-half-billion-dollars-it-collected/)
- [Corrupticut: The Place Where Justice Goes To Die](https://www.earlogarro.com/corrupticut-the-place-where-justice-goes-to-die/)
- [Earl O'Garro Files Grievance Complaint Against Attorney Andrew Crumbie](https://www.earlogarro.com/earl-o-garro-files-grievance-complaint-against-attorney-andrew-crumbie/)
- [Dirty Hands](https://www.earlogarro.com/dirty-hands/)