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What Is There to Celebrate on the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America?
If we must, what we need to celebrate is the basic principles and ideas behind the Declaration of Independence, while being fully cognizant of the fact that we still have a long way to go to achieve equality in this country.
Jun 30, 2026
On July 4, 2026, the United States of America turns 250 years old. Should the Left celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States with the signing of the Declaration of Independence? After all, this is a nation with a very dark and ugly past—with racism, genocide, and imperialism deeply embedded in its psyche.
Surely Native Americans have no reason to celebrate. The history of the United States government’s treatment of Native Americans is one of cruelty, oppression, and extermination. Leaving aside the 56 million Indigenous people that were killed by European settlers across the Americas by 1600, since its independence in 1776, the US government has launched more than 1,500 attacks against various Indigenous people, slaughtering them, and taking their lands. Native Americans in the US continue to face oppression, poverty, and discrimination, and rank near the bottom of all other groups in terms of health, education, and employment.
What about Black Americans? Do they have a reason to celebrate a nation that denied them their humanity for much of those 250 years, while they continue to experience racial discrimination to this day? Racism against Black people remains very much widespread in the Good Ol’ USA.
Should American women have a reason to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday? They have been treated as second-class citizens until fairly recently, and while many countries around the world have or had female leaders, it is a widely shared belief that the US is still not ready for a woman president.
The Declaration of Independence should serve as a stark reminder of the need for a call to action when a government, like the one represented by Donald Trump, acts illegally and unconstitutionally to weaken democratic institutions.
If anything, a major milestone like the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence should be an opportunity to confront the nation’s dark and ugly past and reflect on what has gone wrong with US democracy and what we can do about it. After all, isn’t it a tragic irony that the celebration of America’s 250th birthday, which is supposed to honor the principles of liberty and equality upon which the nation was allegedly founded, will take place with an administration in power whose own beliefs and actions embody the very tyrannical rule that the Declaration of Independence sought to overthrow?
What manner of national progress is this?
But history is not a linear progression. Nor is it guided by the realization of freedom and rationality, as Hegel thought. Human history moves in a spiral, and irrationality makes up a great part of human life and history. Moreover, not only does the value of ideals vary greatly (Nazism and imperialism were as potent ideals as those of democracy and self-determination), but there is usually a disconnect between ideals and political reality. Some of the lofty principles in the Declaration of Independence, such as “all men are created equal,” collided with the facts on the ground and, in fact, had a very narrow interpretation when they were written, as they applied only to white, propertied men.
Indeed, in 2026, we have a president who likes to govern like a king, or a dictator. As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court has given Donald J. Trump king-like powers. Thus, it is hardly surprising that Trump 2.0 has demolished democracy by initiating a new age of authoritarian rule with civil- and human-rights rollbacks, weaponizing the federal government against the president’s political rivals, and unleashing a paramilitary squad of fascist thugs into communities across the nation. It is also hardly surprising that Trump has become the most corrupt president in US history. He is exploiting shamelessly the highest office in the land to enrich himself and his family.
Trump’s enablers extend beyond today’s Supreme Court, which has moved so far rightward that it qualifies as the most reactionary in the nation’s modern history. It includes the plutocrats, media conglomerates, evangelical Christians, and pro-Israel political networks. Retail corporations, major law firms, and academic institutions capitulated with such ease to Trump’s bullying tactics that they made a mockery of liberal ideals.
All that being said, it is difficult not to appreciate the importance of the Declaration of Independence. It is indeed one of the most important documents in the history of politics and ideas for the simple but radical fact that, by articulating the intention of the American colonies to separate from British rule, it established the principles of self-government and individual rights while connecting equality and freedom.
Being profoundly influenced by the philosophical thinking of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (unlike contemporary US leaders, the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams were deeply learned men and had extensive knowledge of history and philosophy), the Declaration of Independence solidified the claims of social contract theory—that is, the idea that governments receive their just powers from the consent of the governed—and justified rebellion against tyranny. Within just a couple of decades, the Declaration of Independence inspired revolts across the globe. It had great impact on political and philosophical debates leading up to the French Revolution (1789) and served as a reference point behind the slave revolt against French colonial rule in Haiti in 1791 and the Irish rebellion against British rule in May 1798.
When Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam an independent nation on September 2, 1945, he paraphrased the US Declaration of Independence. He opened his declaration of independence with the statement from the 1776 Declaration: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But then he updated those words by saying, “In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the Earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have the right to live, to be happy and free.”
Indeed, the Declaration of Independence served as a “universal blueprint” for the anti-colonial struggles that occurred after World War II. It is indeed a radical document. One of its foundational principles is that “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish” governments that become destructive to their fundamental rights. This principle is a cornerstone of democratic theory and should never be forgotten.
Ironically enough, all US administrations have largely abandoned the fundamental principles underpinning the Declaration of Independence—and none more so than President Donald Trump’s administration. The country is on a very slippery path under Donald Trump’s imperial proto-fascism. Democracy is dying before our very own eyes, and Trump’s desire to reshape the world order not only creates more uncertainty and instability but risks opening a Pandora’s box.
It is in this context that the Declaration of Independence should serve as a stark reminder of the need for a call to action when a government, like the one represented by Donald Trump, acts illegally and unconstitutionally to weaken democratic institutions and engages purely in self-dealing while endangering our communities. We have a monstrous, tyrannical government in power that the People must stand up to with all their might before it ruins everything.
If we must, what we need to celebrate on the 250th anniversary since the signing of the Declaration of Independence is nothing more and nothing less than the basic principles and ideas behind this document, in an updated manner, of course, à la Ho Chi Minh, while being fully cognizant of the fact that we still have a long way to go to achieve equality in this country. That was not the intention of those who drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence; nonetheless, they gave the world a political and philosophical document for the ages.
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Silence Is Not Solidarity
If we are serious about building a world where women have equal power—economic, political, and personal—then we have to be serious about accountability within our own ranks
May 06, 2026
In the span of a month, two stories have laid bare an uncomfortable truth about progressive politics: Too many people will protect powerful men at the expense of the women they harm, whether to protect a movement, a party, or because they’ve been conditioned to believe this is how power works.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) announced his resignation from Congress last Month after multiple women came forward with allegations of sexual harassment and assault. March’s revelation by Dolores Huerta that iconic labor leader Cesar Chavez sexually abused girls and women for decades is still reverberating through communities that revered him. In both cases, the pattern is the same: Whisper networks carried warnings for years, but survivors who came forward were silenced or discredited for the sake of the “greater good.”
Why? Because Swalwell was seen as a rising Democratic star, a useful weapon against President Donald Trump. Because Chavez was a civil rights icon whose legacy anchored an entire movement. Because people convinced themselves that exposing the truth would do more damage than burying it.
They were wrong. Silence doesn’t protect movements, it protects oppressors. It tells every woman who has been harassed, groped, or assaulted by a powerful man on “our side” that her pain is an acceptable cost of doing business.
Letting people in power abuse women is never acceptable, regardless of party, regardless of legacy, regardless of how inconvenient the timing might feel.
We have seen this calculation before—the quiet bargain where accountability is sacrificed on the altar of political convenience. It never works. The truth always surfaces. And when it does, the cover-up inflicts its own damage, compounding the harm to survivors and eroding the moral authority these movements depend on.
Consider the moment we’re in. We have a president who was found liable by a jury for sexually abusing a woman, and accused by at least 28 others, and has faced no meaningful consequences for it. A president who has made clear, through word and policy, that he believes powerful men can do whatever they want. His administration is rolling back decades of progress on combatting sexual harassment and assault in workplaces and schools; gutting protections against discrimination; and dismantling the legal infrastructure women depend on for safe, equitable workplaces. The Supreme Court, made up of one-third of Trump appointees, is the first since the 1950s to rule against women and people of color in a majority of civil rights cases.
This is the landscape women are navigating right now. And into this landscape, we are supposed to accept that the men or other abusers on “our side” get a pass? No.
If we are serious about building a world where women have equal power—economic, political, and personal—then we have to be serious about accountability within our own ranks. Not because it’s easy, but because the alternative is corrosive. Every time we look the other way, we tell the next generation that a woman’s safety matters less than a man’s career. We weaken the very movements we claim to be protecting.
The women who came forward about Swalwell, including content creators who had no institutional backing, no legal team—just their own platforms and conviction—showed extraordinary courage. So did the survivors who finally broke decades of silence about Chavez. They did what the political establishment was unwilling to do. They chose the truth.
The lesson here is not that our movements are broken. It’s that they are only as strong as our willingness to hold everyone in them accountable. Letting people in power abuse women is never acceptable, regardless of party, regardless of legacy, regardless of how inconvenient the timing might feel.
We are in a fight for women’s futures in this country. That fight requires moral clarity. It requires us to stop treating accountability as a threat and start treating it as the foundation. Good things, lasting things, come from doing what is right, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.
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5 Lessons From the End of the Larry Summers Era
Summers’ influence was immense, but so were his blind spots. It’s time for economics that values people and the planet over power and prestige.
Dec 03, 2025
The era of Larry Summers’ dominance in American economics is over. It’s a good moment to take stock.
Summers has been just about everywhere money talks. From Harvard to the Treasury, through the Clinton and Obama White Houses, onto Wall Street, and into think tanks and policy networks that shape the nation’s economy—including the Center for American Progress, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution—he has left a mark few economists ever achieve.
Yet his career also shows the risks of concentrating authority in economists whose prestige, ambition, and attachment to abstract models can outweigh attention to real lives. Time and again, he let the interests of financial elites, spreadsheet obsession, and ingrained biases create troubling blind spots. The consequences for ordinary people and the planet simply faded into the background.
The silver lining: Summers’ record offers a clear road map for reform, highlighting what economics should not be: a discipline that prioritizes prestige, profit, and elegant equations. And it points toward what it could be: smarter, fairer, more accountable, and genuinely focused on human well-being and the Earth we inhabit.
Lesson 1: Sexism is Costly
Let’s be blunt: Economists who don’t see women as equals weaken the very core of their discipline.
Tasked with understanding how people, resources, and institutions interact, they can’t model societies, predict outcomes, or craft effective policy if they don’t accurately perceive half the population. Bias isn’t just a moral failure. It corrupts analysis.
If Summers had respected women’s intellectual authority, he might have heeded Brooksley Born when she pushed to regulate derivatives as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Summers’ comments while president of Harvard suggesting women lack the natural faculties to excel in higher mathematics and science reveal a deeper flaw: outdated, discriminatory, and intellectually sloppy thinking. (Any lingering doubt about his mindset vanishes when you read his 2017 email to Jeffrey Epstein: “I observed that half of the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51% of population.” A leap beyond casual sexism, this was a bold assertion of women’s intellectual inferiority).
Such attitudes have real consequences for economics, leadership, and policy.
Consider: If Summers had respected women’s intellectual authority, he might have heeded Brooksley Born when she pushed to regulate derivatives as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Instead, he joined forces with Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin to shut her down—a disastrous misstep that helped set the stage for the unregulated derivatives boom and the 2008 financial crisis.
America is still paying for that one.
The economics profession itself pays a steep price for sexism. Institute for New Economic Thininkig research by Giulia Zacchia, Orsola Constantini, and Moshen Javdani shows that structural bias in hiring, research evaluation, and theoretical norms pushes women and fresh ideas to the margins, producing models and policies that miss the full picture of how economies really function.
Summers’ personal conduct compounds his professional failings. In the Epstein files, Summers discussed a Chinese female mentee in explicitly sexual terms. He detailed his attraction and referred to the possibility of a sexual relationship, asking Epstein whether it was “meaningful” to discuss “the probability of my getting horizontal w peril,” a code name for the woman in question. He speculated about how to make himself seem “invaluable and interesting” to her, implying that intimacy could follow. This behavior obviously violates professional boundaries.
Sexual harassment isn’t just harmful to the people targeted—it hurts businesses, families, and the economy too, as I have documented (Parramore, 2018), while Zacchia and Izaskun Zuazu emphasize the need to challenge the deep-rooted gender inequalities that make harassment possible. Unfortunately, Summers’ sexism proved too deeply rooted to excise.
Summers’ departure opens the door to economics that not only produces more accurate models and better outcomes for society, but fully embraces the talents and insights of female students and economists.
Lesson 2: When Economists Favor Wall Street, America Suffers
Summers’ career offers a clear example of how cozy ties between elite economists and Wall Street create harm.
While president of Harvard (2001-2006), Summers had what colleagues described as a “huge influence over Harvard money matters.” He pushed for a risky investment strategy for the university’s endowment, even though as early as 2002, Iris Mack, an analyst at the Harvard Management Company (HMC), warned Summers’ chief of staff about what she described as “frightening” use of derivatives and inadequate risk-management protocols. But her warnings, and those of Jack Meyer, the head of the endowment, who warned of investments in “stocks, bonds, hedge funds, and private equity,” were disregarded by Summers. (Mack was dismissed, and alleges she was fired for voicing concerns; she later reached a settlement with the university).
Summers’ investment strategy backfired sharply when the 2008 crash hit, costing the university dearly: 27% of its endowment, to be precise. By then, Summers was working at a hedge fund and would soon spin through the revolving door into Barack Obama’s White House.
In another telling episode, Summers shielded his colleague Andrei Shleifer during the scandal over Harvard’s 1990s-era Russia privatization program. Shleifer and associates were found liable by a federal court for using insider access to invest in Russia while advising on US-funded economic programs: a clear conflict-of-interest. Harvard ended up shelling out a $26.5 million settlement, but Shleifer kept his tenured position, thanks in part to Summers’ influence.
Summers’ Wall Street-friendly instincts have reached deeply into policy. During the 1990s and early 2000s, he advocated deregulation and reduced oversight for banks, contributing to the conditions that triggered the 2007-2008 financial meltdown, when millions of regular people lost jobs, homes, and savings. After public office, he continued profiting from that same financial ecosystem, collecting large fees through consulting, speaking engagements, and corporate board positions.
In Wall Street’s corner he remained: In 2023, he pushed the government to guarantee all deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, arguing that failing to do so would be a “Lehman-like error,” while downplaying conflicts of interest with firms tied to the bank. He warned against listening to “moral hazard lectures” about bailouts. (It was not reassuring to learn that Summers turned out to have undisclosed ties to firms connected to SVB’s largest depositors).
In 2025, Summers warned that asset prices are “frothy,” but instead of calling for regulations or protections for people who might lose their savings, he framed his concern in a way that would calm investors. His focus seemed to be on keeping financial elites calm above all else.
Summers has consistently emphasized market stability over robust support for working people, advocating Fed policies that favor large banks and investors. Coupled with his continued advisory roles with financial-sector firms (many now lost due to the Epstein files), these moves reinforced a career-long pattern: prioritizing the interests of the wealthy while leaving Main Street to fend for itself.
Which brings us to the next lesson.
3. Working People Must Be Prioritized in Economics
Regrettably, it bears repeating that economics has too often been treated as a game for elites, focused on numbers on paper, financial flows, and abstract deficits, while the jobs, homes, and livelihoods of working people are pushed aside. Summers personifies this very problem.
For example, Summers pushed interest‑rate hikes and emphasized deficit reduction over job creation. As political protégé of deficit‑hawk Rubin, and later as head of the National Economic Council (NEC), under Obama, Summers repeatedly plugged austerity, even at times when stimulus was badly needed to support working people.
In December 2008, a full month before Obama’s inauguration, Summers drafted a 57‑page memo warning of a grim economic outlook, but he also downplayed how severe the downturn could be. That memo laid the foundation for a flawed stimulus plan and economic strategy that prioritized deficit targets over urgent jobs recovery.
Larry Summers’s record on global economic policy offers a revealing portrait of his priorities: market logic over human lives, and financial returns over planetary survival.
The results were stark. Actual job losses far outpaced the administration’s optimistic estimates, and the recovery was painfully slow for millions of Americans. After leaving the NEC, Summers went on to warn against aggressive fiscal support, focusing instead on deficit risk and inflation concerns, often at the expense of middle‑class wage earners trying to get back on their feet.
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Summers repeatedly championed what many view as market-first, investor-friendly economic priorities over aggressive support for working-class Americans. In 2021 he blasted the stimulus bill (American Rescue Plan) as “the least responsible macroeconomic policy in 40 years,” warning that huge fiscal spending combined with loose monetary policy was “kindling” an inflation fire.
This neglect of working people is a failure of economics. When economists treat deficits and interest rates as ends in themselves, rather than tools to support lives and livelihoods, they lose the real purpose of economic analysis.
For too long, the rules of economic policy have been written by those fail to understand the stakes of unemployment, insecure work, or debt. Larry Summers isn’t just a powerful economist, he’s also very wealthy: His net worth rocketed from around $400,000 in the mid-1990s to $7-31 million by 2009, largely through high-paid Wall Street consulting, hedge-fund work, and speaking fees. Today, estimates put him at roughly $40-50 million.
Perhaps this background helps explain his longstanding emphasis on austerity over labor-market protections.
4. Economics for the Planet, Not Just Profits
Larry Summers’s record on global economic policy offers a revealing portrait of his priorities: market logic over human lives, and financial returns over planetary survival.
Over decades, he repeatedly helped shape policies that forced vulnerable populations, particularly in developing countries, to subordinate basic needs like health, education, and environmental protection to debt repayment and economic “efficiency.”
One episode has come to symbolize this worldview. In 1991, while serving as chief economist for the World Bank, Summers’ office circulated an internal memo drafted by Lant Pritchet and cosigned by himself, which suggested that dumping toxic waste in developing countries would actually benefit them economically. The memo noted that, because wages and estimated “economic losses” from illness were lower in developing countries, the health costs of pollution would be “cheaper” there than in wealthier nations. Although Pritchett later insisted the memo was merely sarcasm, the fact that it moved through Summers’ office and carried his signature sparked international outrage.
After the memo became public, Summers told a reporter: "I think the best that can be said is to quote La Guardia and say, 'When I make a mistake, it's a whopper.'"
Many agreed. Brazil’s then-Secretary of the Environment Jose Lutzenburger, excoriated Summers’s logic as “perfectly logical but totally insane,” noting that it exemplified “the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness, and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in.”
This was not just a one-off. In the 90s, Summers used his power to block meaningful climate action, opposing US participation in Kyoto Protocol. He claimed that rapid greenhouse‑gas reductions could carry “unknowable economic consequences.”
Even when he later moved toward what some considered climate-friendly policies, his proposals revealed much about his real concerns. For instance, in 2017 he backed a modest carbon-pricing scheme, but only if it replaced stronger environmental regulation and came with rebates and border adjustments. In an op-ed titled, “Why we should all embrace a fantastic Republican proposal to save the planet,” he favored “raising the price of carbon and less emphasis on command-and-control regulation.” That approach aligns neatly with the wish lists of deep-pocketed polluters and carries little of the urgency environmental scientists and communities fighting climate disaster demand.
Summers also supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has been widely criticized for undermining environmental regulations in Mexico, weakening labor protections, and allowing corporations to externalize ecological costs across borders. Once again, Summers appeared to prioritize trade liberalization and corporate profits over environmental justice and workers’ rights.
Under Obama, he continued to warn of potential economic risks of aggressive efforts to limit carbon emissions. More recently, in 2022, Summers promoted a World Bank plan to leverage massive new borrowing to address poverty and encourage a “global green transition.” On the surface, this looks progressive, until the focus on financing and efficiency is revealed. Rather than advocating real structural change, Summers continues a pattern of putting capital and market mechanisms over meaningful, just environmental action.
5. A New Beginning
In the big picture, Summers’s retreat leaves both a gap and a long‑overdue opportunity.
More than ever, the US—and the world—needs economists who put real people first: who design policies that protect jobs, homes, and communities; who confront climate change rather than downplay it; who treat women, working people, and marginalized groups as full participants; and who put their focus on social well‑being.
As the 19h‑century critic John Ruskin famously wrote, “The only wealth is life.” Economics must finally reflect that truth (Spear, Parramore, 2015).
We now have a chance to build a life‑centered economics, one that prioritizes human flourishing, environmental stewardship, and equitable opportunity—not just the interests of the elite few.
The opportunity is here. Let’s seize it.
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