The spin is in! The Trump administration’s economic ‘message bearers’, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Kevin Hasset, the president’s senior economic adviser, have launched a coordinated effort to calm the growing public concern that the current economic contraction due to the COVID-19 pandemic may be as bad (or worse) than the Great Depression of the 1930s.

It can be expected that the COVID-19 virus will have a large negative impact on the standard of living and wages of millions of working class American families. They will have to bear the burden of the cost with little help from their government. Meanwhile, businesses and investors will get bailed out, ‘made whole’, once again.

The US and global economies are well on their way to a repeat of the ‘great recession’ (or worse) of 2008-09. Only this time traditional monetary-fiscal policy is much less effective. More radical policy responses will likely be developed to try to stabilize the capitalist economies both in USA and elsewhere (where problems are even more severe).

Democratic Party leaders are talking themselves into the fiction that, even if they deny the nomination to Sanders, his supporters and movement will have ‘no where else to go’ but to fall in line behind Biden. But they do have somewhere to go: they’ll sit home. And then they’ll perhaps go out and organize a party independent of today’s Democratic Party.

What are the political ‘takeaways’ from yesterday’s South Carolina primary? In just a few words: not many. None that change the fundamental dynamics that have shaped the primaries to date. Biden bought himself some time, at the expense of Bloomberg and the other mainstream candidates like Klobuchar, Steyer, and Buttigieg.

The choice the leadership faces is whether to transform itself into a Trump-like party, openly run by oligarchs and billionaires; or to return to a pre-1990 Democratic party—before the DLC faction takeover—and allow Bernie Sanders to become its presidential candidate. The party leadership’s current actions clearly show it now leans heavily toward the former.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump delivered a State of the Union speech that revealed his 2020 election strategy, designed to roil and mobilize his political base, and to declare to the Democrats that his political war with them will now escalate further. If anyone thinks the recent impeachment and Senate trial was the high point of the growing conflict between the two political parties, they haven’t seen anything yet.

Trump’s assassination of Iran’s general and senior diplomat, Qassim Suleimani, was a clear provocation by the United States, designed to produce an escalated military response by Iran. That did not happen. Iran did not take the bait. It responded minimally and appears to have done so in a way to avoid US deaths or even major US asset destruction. If Iran had escalated militarily, which it was capable of doing, it would have fallen into Trump’s trap.

History repeats itself, as they say. But in the age of American empire, not just twice, or even three times, but with disturbing regularity. The past half century shows two things about how America goes to war: First, it creates a provocation based on a lie. Second, it then makes its target adversary an ‘offer they can only refuse’, as the final justification for US military action once the adversary rejects the unacceptable offer.

The evolution of neoliberal policies since the 1980s is highly correlated with the decline of democracy in America. Democratic norms, practices, rights and civil liberties, have been in atrophy and decay over the period. Moreover, the decline has accelerated in recent decades as neoliberalism became more aggressive in implementing its policy objectives as opposition to it has intensified.