Jeffrey Sachs is a magnificent orator.  His speech in the European Parliament a couple of months ago denouncing the decades-long destructive behavior of the United States on the world stage was a tour de force. I take my hat off to him for that.

However, by professional training, he is an economist not an orator and it is my intention to address that side of his activities in this brief essay.

In the 1990s, Sachs was a key foreign adviser to Poland and Russia in their transition from Communist-led planned economies to market economies.  In Poland, this transition was overly long but reasonably successful in the end as measured by growing prosperity if not by economic sovereignty as the country became a colony of Germany. I always considered that Poland’s success was due less to the sage advice of Sachs and other carpetbaggers from U.S. universities and more to the return to Poland of Western trained Polish business cadres from London, from the USA after the fall of Communism. It is they who took leading positions in the economy.

In Russia, Sachs’ advice on drastic reforms, taken up by Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar and his followers, resulted in catastrophic collapse of the economy, in generalized pauperization of the population while a very few foxes among the sheep became fabulously wealthy – those whom we in the West came to know as ‘oligarchs.’  The entire process gave democracy and free markets a dirty name in Russia that the population has still not outlived.

To be sure, Sachs at the time and ever since has said in exculpation that he had also advised the U.S. government at the time to extend massive financial assistance to Russia to see it through the painful period of transition. This Washington did not do, of course.  Nice words, but they do nothing to mitigate the real damage, meaning the closing of most factories and production facilities caused by the shock therapy urged by Sachs and other Liberals. They came to Russia with an inflated sense of their own skills, ignoring the fact that no one, NO ONE in the 1990s had relevant experience to see any country the size of Russia through the shift to a market economy. In ordinary parlance, we call that hubris.  Hubris is not just monopolized by the President and his entourage in Washington.

Let us now move forward to today.  Jeffrey Sachs’ latest interviews, which are watched by vast audiences on youtube, persuade me that, as they say, the dog has returned to his vomit.  He is selling highly partisan anti-Trump economics.

There are in this Community those who will object to my criticizing so sharply and publicly another upstanding member of the Opposition Movement to U.S. hegemonism.  I ask that you hold your fire and hear me out.  First, because Sachs himself is directing ad hominem attacks against others in public space. 

The commentators in The Washington Post are ‘idiots’ he tells us.  They may be wrong-headed. They may be paid well to lie. But I don’t think they are mentally deficient.

The analysts producing papers promoting ‘American primacy’ are not analysts at all, Sachs tells us.  Really?  Misguided, I would say.  Dishonest, I would say.  But that they are not analysts?  Really, Mr. Sachs, do clean up your language if you expect others in the Movement like me to be more indulgent towards you.

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The interview which got my attention yesterday focused on U.S. relations with China, which, said Sachs, were splendid from the mid-1970s up to 2010 when America’s foreign policy elites decided that China was growing too fast and was threatening America’s national ambition to retain global ‘primacy.’  From that point on, the demonization of Beijing set in. Defense alliances were constructed to ‘contain’ China. Trade alliances were designed to isolate China. And so forth, and so on, taking us to the present day when the American foreign policy establishment is preparing the broad public for the idea of a military clash with China that will remove the threat to American global hegemony once and for all.

So, China was no threat to the American economy? 

Says Sachs, it was all win-win.  American companies prospered by manufacturing cheaply in China and participating in global distribution.  California did stunningly well from the China trade, he tells us.  OK, he concedes, sotto voce, the American Mid-West took a hit and industries there suffered, but the problem could have been addressed by assistance from Washington, if Washington had an industrial policy, which it stupidly (per Sachs) does not have.

Dear Mr. Sachs, I ask you to follow the current rules of transparency when you issue your sweeping commentary like the foregoing.  You are wedded to globalization, which was, above all, an economic policy backed by the Democrats and has been their chief point of pride in economic policy.  Think of al those multilateral free trade agreements that every Democratic president had to have on his CV.

No matter that the Dems are supposedly the party of the working class while globalization has and always will strip away well-paying manufacturing jobs that allowed working class people to live normal lives and to prepare their offspring for middle class professional jobs, if they so wished. Those manufacturing jobs have been replaced by part time work, gigs, delivery work for Uber Eats, at best jobs in McDonalds flipping burgers.  All of this is not my personal discovery. It has been called out long ago by many, including by the incumbent Republican president.

I am not saying that imposition of crippling tariffs on Chinese exports is justified. Moderation always makes for better statesmanship.  But directionally, the USA has to undo the excesses of outsourcing and to repeal the tax legislation that made production abroad more profitable for US corporations than production at home. Such carve-outs always provide greater advantages to certain industries and to certain companies within those industries than to the economy as a whole.  While my peers all speak in unison about the bribery of Congress by the military industrial complex, so far I do not hear a word about the bribery of Congress by industries and by specific companies within those industries seeking or enjoying the terms of multilateral free trade pacts and the tax benefits of producing and retaining profits abroad.

Mr. Sachs, where are you on all of those issues?  Or are they also just the tomfoolery of ‘idiots’?

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025