A Culture of Violence Finds Its Nearly

Perfect Number of Victims

Michael Slager

May 20, 2026

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Cooper with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Photograph Source: U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Michael Ito – Public Domain

Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of US Central Command whose responsibilities include coordinating attacks on Iran, recently testified at a Senate hearing. Cooper said that when it comes to Iranian civilian deaths caused by US missiles, the United States has done a practically flawless job. The New York Times reported that Cooper suggested: “the US military’s record … had been near perfect.”

According to Admiral Cooper, near perfection apparently translates to an estimated 1,700 civilian deaths in Iran since February 28, when the United States and Israel began an unprovoked war of aggression. Unprovoked military attacks are major crimes under international law. In fact, they are a violation of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter.

That nearly perfect record includes the deaths of about 254 children, 120 of whom (and likely more) were killed on the very first day of the illegal war when a Tomahawk missile slammed into an elementary school. About thirty teachers and parents were also killed.

Closer to home, we are approaching the fourth anniversary this month of a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered. One does not need a law degree to know that shooting up a school is against the law, too.

Would it be remotely acceptable—or sane—to opine that Salvador Ramos, the shooter at Uvalde, would have had a nearly perfect, practically spotless body count to his name if just one or two children were killed? Many legislators certainly don’t fuss over these fine distinctions since they could not have cared less about any number of murdered school children in Texas or Iran, a sentiment that in itself is criminal, but not in any formal legal sense. No, they proceeded in a perfectly legal manner when they resisted calls for substantial gun safety legislation. It also seems to be perfectly acceptable to the US Congress to not restrain a president from unprovoked war making.

After Uvalde, lawmakers instead offered their perfectly usual platitudes and prayers. They also professed their boundless love for the Second Amendment and their seething hatred of the tyranny that would surely arise if even a little of the deadliest ordnance Americans can lay their hands on were ever fenced off from public access. To their credit, however, they didn’t get in front of the TV cameras in the US Senate to say that Ramos, unlike the Trump administration and the Pentagon, exhibited nearly perfect conduct.

Near perfection only applies to those wielding high-tech weapons worth billions of dollars that eviscerate a comparatively small number of innocent people; it of course does not refer to a psychopath with a gun that was purchased at Outback Sports to slaughter a score of children.

Near perfection only applies to polished functionaries dressed in uniforms and business suits, not to some maladjusted, enraged teenager fatally cosplaying Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.

Admiral Cooper said that the school bombing in Iran is under investigation. Just that one, though, not the estimated 22 other schools that were reportedly turned into rubble and ash. He found that number impossible to verify even though it could be. The military also seems uninterested in the bombings of hospitals, clinics, and residential areas. Ignoring those other deaths would preserve a self-described excellent record of avoiding civilian deaths.

Why might the killing of ordinary adults and children in Iran be a nearly perfect illustration of blameless violence?

One reason is that the victims in Iran were not people at all because, as we are told over and over again, they want to hurt us. Those in the media who claim expert knowledge but know nothing about the Middle East and Islam constantly treat us to lectures about how angry Arabs and Persians harbor a blind hatred for us that compels them to seek the West’s destruction. They are beasts who prefer Oriental depots to lord over them, and that sort of evil should be consigned to oblivion. Importantly, we can apparently achieve near perfection in our struggle against them if fatalities hover around some arbitrary number.

By contrast, the children in Uvalde were people. They lived in our country and were Christians, so they were allowed a small measure of pity. Also, there were a lot of victims in that case. More than normal. Those murders fueled tepid outcries and fleeting national grief. That they were tepid and fleeting was shown in what didn’t happen after those 19 funerals: What didn’t happen was a fulsome and broad shouldering of national trauma over the dismembering of small bodies by swarms of bullets. Such home-grown atrocities should have resulted in voters showing many lawmakers the door at the very first electoral opportunity.

But that didn’t happen. In other countries, legislators enact more effective firearm laws after mass shootings, but meaningful change doesn’t happen here; our leadership is able to cultivate perfectly undamaged careers in the aftermath of deaths that they largely ignore. Sometimes, they claim that extinguishing the lives of children is the price of freedom.

We are so accustomed to our culture’s hideous violence that it goes unchecked and, depending on the body count, often passes unnoticed. One would think we haven’t a blemish of violence here at home given lawmakers’ stubborn refusal to address it. However, when lots of child-sized body bags are required, our atomized population starts to pay attention, but it still feels largely powerless to stop what happens on the next block or in the next state. When the public does pay attention, that can be dangerous for planners; frightening people and engendering a sense of helplessness impedes focused attention on officially sanctioned criminality. Barring deflection, attention and anger could otherwise become threatening to those in power.

And forget halfway around the world where, according to some notable government officials like Ron DeSantis, non-people are intent on killing infidels and establishing Sharia law. Unaccountable exported violence stamped with “Made in the USA” comes with a guarantee that the deaths of brown Muslims will be described as perfectly fine, especially when, like here at home, the numbers are relatively small.

Similar to the Uvalde mass shooting, things become uncomfortable when the fatality count sharply rises. For example, the United States has been helping Israel turn Gaza into a wasteland for more than two years. Recent estimates show that nearly 73,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 21,000 children. Americans have expressed increasing opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank to the point that almost 60 percent have considerably negative views of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Interestingly, about the same proportion of Americans believe that gun control laws should be much stricter.

The divide between political elites and the population is vast. The former has no problem with generating a perfect number of victims, just enough so that we do nothing about it. When fatalities increase, they can simply be ignored, or pundits and planners can reach into a deep reservoir of Islamophobia to justify murder. However, that can change because we have power in numbers.

Michael Slager is an English teacher at Loyola University Chicago.

The 2026 World Financial Crisis

Michael Hudson

 May 20, 2026

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Photo by Edwin Hooper

Interest rates are rising as if this will simply compensate investors for the risk of inflation. The reality is that it will increase the economy’s inability to cope with the breakdown that is already in progress.

How Did the Myth of Interest Rates Rising in Response to Price Inflation Begin?

The moral rationalization is to protect the purchasing power of creditor claims on debtors, as measured by the purchasing power of debt payments over consumer prices.

The pretense is that creditors use their interest to buy goods and services. But already in the 18^th century, critics of debt financing recognized that bondholders recycle most of their money into new loans. When they do spend part of their interest income into the “real” non-financial economy, it is mainly to buy prestige real estate, primarily in major financial centers, and secondly on luxury goods – mainly imported, in Italy in the mid-18^th century, just as today.

By the 19^th century, creditors sought some excuse to justify their interest charges by depicting these as compensation for the risk that they might have to suffer a loss through loan defaults or by a loss of their purchasing power over goods and services as prices rose – and more to the point, over the labor that produced these products.

Austrian economists such as Böhm-Bawerk went so far as to claim that interest was a payment for the “service” of abstaining from consuming their income, but using “time preference” to consume more later. Having to pay interest, thus was depicted as the price of “impatience.” It was as if wage earners (“consumers”) had a choice to abstain from running into debt, lacking prudence. This prompted Marx to quip that the Rothschild bankers must be the most abstinent family in Europe. It was as if there was no financial sector of bankers and bondholders acting independently of the economy of production and consumption.

Raising Interest Rates to Slow Employment and Keep Wages Low

The more recent 20th-century logic is that of Paul Volcker, when he increased interest rates to over 20% at the end of the Carter administration in 1980. He saw wages rising as a result of the Vietnam War’s “guns and butter” fiscal policy, called military Keynesianism in times when the aim is to increase profits, investment and employment. Volcker, formerly a Chase Manhattan banker, wanted to increase unemployment so as to keep wages from rising further. He succeeded in creating a crash as bank interest rates rose to 20%.

That obviously is not the aim of today’s rise in interest rates. But it is the effect. And this is just the opposite of compensating for risk. It sharply increases economic risk throughout the economy, not only for industry and employment but for the financial sector. That is what makes today’s high stock market prices so puzzling, a short-term focus on just riding the wave of rumors floated by the Trump administration about the likelihood of peace restoring the happy status quo ante.

Governments Lower Interest Rates Mainly to Increase Debt-Leveraged Prices for Financial Wealth

The guiding fiction in the idea that rising interest rates will slow price inflation by reducing investment and employment that banks help the industrial economy by creating credit to lend to companies to expand the economy. But that is not what banks do under finance capitalism. They lend against assets already in place and available to be pledged as collateral, for the purpose of buying more real estate, bonds and stocks. The effect of these loans is to inflate asset prices, not consumer prices.

Governments and their central banks may pretend to be lowering interest rates to spur the economy, but the basic reason is to re-inflate prices for financial securities and real estate. That’s the main aim of today’s finance capitalism, after all. Its aim of increasing fortunes by creating debt-leveraged asset-price gains has turned economies into a great Ponzi scheme.

This policy must fail because keeping prices for collateral held by banks and other creditors from falling in price, and thus causing a loss of financialized asset-price gains, requires the economy to take on more and more debt.

Obama’s Bank Bailout and ZIRP Has Left the U.S. Economy Debt-Leveraged

The U.S. Federal Reserve’s response to the 2008 junk-mortgage bank crash is informative for how the government may seek to cope with the coming financial crisis.  Real estate and corporate debt prices were plunging because of defaults on junk mortgages and the web of bad casino bets on financial derivatives. The Obama administration’s response was to inaugurate the Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP). The Federal Reserve rescued the banks from negative equity by loading the banking system – and via it, the financial markets – with low-interest debt leveraging.

The result was the greatest bond market boom in history – but not a boom for industry and labor. A K-shaped U.S. economy saw sharply rising wealth for the One Percent, but the industrial economy has continued to suffer its long decline as wages and industrial profits are being spent on the FIRE sector – Finance, Insurance (including health insurance under the privatized Obamacare) and Real Estate.

Financially engineering the post-2008 asset-price “recovery” for real estate, stocks and bonds has left the economy so highly debt-leveraged that there is little room for an economic downturn caused by interruptions of OPEC’s oil and gas trade. The oil shortage is indeed raising the commodity price levels, but this is not a result of higher employment or wage levels. It is a result of Trump’s war to maintain control of the world’s oil trade in U.S. hands. Iran has responded by saying that if other nations do not act to stop Trump’s attack, Iran will destroy Arab oil production and the whole world will pay the price of being pushed into a prolonged economic depression. And the world has stood by, as if believing that the United States can conquer Iran as it did Venezuela and somehow restore normal relations under U.S. control and avoid world depression.

But Trump is said to be thinking of one last great air strike. Whether or not this occurs, it is now obvious that the effect of world oil shortages and the resulting rise in oil prices will force major industries to shut down throughout the world: chemical producers, fertilizer and mining that depend on sulfuric acid, energy users such as aluminum and glass making, plastics needing naphtha, manufacturing, and course household heating and lighting. Their linkages for production will be interrupted at critical points, forcing them to lay off their employees and shut down because they cannot continue to produce and make profits.

It also means that such companies will not be able to meet their scheduled debt service obligations to their bondholders and bankers, not to speak of stopping their stock buyback programs. That is what happens in a depression.

The result will be not only price deflation, but a deflation of markets and consumer “demand” and a wave of debt defaults. That threatens a transfer of collateral and other property from debtors to creditors, whose problems with collecting may nonetheless leave them with negative equity. So we are back in 2009, but without any opportunity to pile on yet more debt to enable economies to “borrow their way out of debts” that have been taken on for the past 27 years.

Rising Interest Rates are an Untenable Solution to Today’s Imminent Depression

The big question that must be asked is how long the U.S. economy can sustain long-term interest rates of over 5% for Treasury 30-year bonds, 4/6%+ for 10-year bonds, and circa 7% for home mortgage loans. Many loans for commercial real estate and also private equity are soon coming due to be rolled over. How can these debts be refinanced at the rates that are looming? And new construction and property sales will be constrained by the inability of new borrowers to pay the higher carrying charges for homes or other properties.

The government will try to do what it usually does: bail out the financial sector, not the “real” economy, which already is being crucified on a cross of debt. But governments are not moving to protect labor’s wages and living standards, or even their industry’s solvency. Central banks aim to save the financial sector – that is, financialized wealth that has been inflated by debt-leveraging as prices for real estate, stocks and bonds have been bid up on credit. But the Federal Reserve has already been holding an enormous increase in Treasury bonds to finance Trump’s soaring budget deficit. How will voters respond to the administration favoring the wealthiest One Percent while leaving the rest of the economy to suffer?

How Should the West React to Such a Problem If We Lived in an Ideal World?

There is an age-old solution to prevent an economic crisis from resulting from interruptions in harvests, and it is applicable to today’s interruption of the world’s energy trade. But that solution is not one that has become part of Western civilization.

The laws of Hammurabi, c. 1750 BC, typified how Mesopotamia and other West Asian civilization coped with such interruptions in production from the 3^rd through the 1^st millennia BC, restoring economic order for thousands of years. Hammurabi ruled that if the Storm God Adad caused a crop failure as a result of a flood or a drought, the debts that cultivators had run up during the crop year and expected to be paid on the public threshing floor at harvest time would be cancelled. (Many such debts were to the palace and its bureaucracy, so this did not create a revolution by angry creditors. Business debts among merchants were left intact – only grain debts by the disrupted agrarian population were cancelled.)

If these personal debts had not been cancelled, Babylonia’s agrarian population would have been subject to debt bondage to creditors, and to losing their land tenure rights to what would have become an emerging creditor oligarchy.  I have described all this in … And Forgive Them Their Debts” and  Temples of Enterprise.

Such debt cancellations in the face of natural disasters enabled the West Asian economies to avoid the emergence of creditor oligarchies. But Western societies have never had such central rulers, “divine kingship” or Confucian emperors to prevent such oligarchies from gaining control of governments and causing widespread public discontent. As I have described this failure of Western civilization in my Collapse of Antiquity, all government has been by oligarchies (as Aristotle noted), and they invariably fall subject to money-love and wealth addiction that polarizes economies between creditors and debtors, landlords and renters, leading to economic collapse such as that of Rome.

Prospects for Today’s U.S. and Foreign Economies in the Face of the Oil Crisis

Today’s financial markets seem to expect the Federal Reserve to follow its usual knee-jerk reaction to rising consumer prices by raising interest rates. As noted above, this is supposed to slow the economy and create a “reserve army of the unemployed” to keep wages down by causing economic distress. But the U.S. economy is not in a boom or even thriving. It and other economies are already in distress as a result of the looming oil and energy crisis. In addition to companies scaling back their production and commercial real estate and homeowners face real estate mortgages falling due. Rising interest rates will push the cost of refinancing these mortgages and other debts beyond the ability of debtors to pay out of their falling income.

The result threatens to be a vast transfer of property from debtors to creditors. The United States and Western Europe, thus may experience something like Asian countries did in their currency crisis of 1997-1998. That would be a bonanza for vulture funds to sweep in and acquire real estate and companies at distress prices.

Nobody is suggesting a “Babylonian” solution of suspending debt service for economies that are unable to pay on an economy-wide scale. The West’s creditor-oriented legal systems call for a transfer of property ownership as banks and bondholders take over collateral that has been pledged for debt or property that debtors are forced to sell.

Much of this collateral consists of claims of other companies throughout the economy, so the crisis will engulf the entire social and political system. This is what was threatened back in 2008-2009 when the junk-mortgage and bank-fraud crisis led to a collapse in real estate prices. But the economy’s Ponzi Scheme of increasing wealth by debt leveraging by supplying new credit has reached the limit.

We can now see that the long upsweep since 1945 that seemed to be a series of self-correcting business cycles has been a failed finance-capitalist detour from industrial capitalism that has no automatic self-correcting market forces. The solution must come from outside the market system. And that is something that neither academic economics nor the public relations ideology of free markets (meaning unregulated and privatized economies, Thatcher-Reagan style) has closed its eyes to. The future will call for thinking about the unthinkable. It requires recognition that debts that can’t be paid won’t be.

Michael Hudson’s Killing the Host, The Collapse of Antiquity and The Destiny of Civilization are published by CounterPunch Books.