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Bernie Sanders | Washington's Dangerous New Consensus on China
Bernie Sanders, Foreign Affairs
Sanders writes: "The unprecedented global challenges that the United States faces today - climate change, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, massive economic inequality, terrorism, corruption, authoritarianism - are shared global challenges. They cannot be solved by any one country acting alone."
he unprecedented global challenges that the United States faces today—climate change, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, massive economic inequality, terrorism, corruption, authoritarianism—are shared global challenges. They cannot be solved by any one country acting alone. They require increased international cooperation—including with China, the most populous country on earth.
It is distressing and dangerous, therefore, that a fast-growing consensus is emerging in Washington that views the U.S.-Chinese relationship as a zero-sum economic and military struggle. The prevalence of this view will create a political environment in which the cooperation that the world desperately needs will be increasingly difficult to achieve.
It is quite remarkable how quickly conventional wisdom on this issue has changed. Just over two decades ago, in September 2000, corporate America and the leadership of both political parties strongly supported granting China “permanent normal trade relations” status, or PNTR. At that time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the corporate media, and virtually every establishment foreign policy pundit in Washington insisted that PNTR was necessary to keep U.S. companies competitive by giving them access to China’s growing market, and that the liberalization of China’s economy would be accompanied by the liberalization of China’s government with regard to democracy and human rights.
This position was seen as obviously and unassailably correct. Granting PNTR, the economist Nicholas Lardy of the centrist Brookings Institution argued in the spring of 2000, would “provide an important boost to China’s leadership, that is taking significant economic and political risks in order to meet the demands of the international community for substantial additional economic reforms.” The denial of PNTR, on the other hand, “would mean that U.S. companies would not benefit from the most important commitments China has made to become a member” of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Writing around the same time, the political scientist Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute put it more bluntly. “American trade with China is a good thing, for America and for the expansion of freedom in China,” he asserted. “That seems, or should seem, obvious.”
Well, it wasn’t obvious to me, which is why I helped lead the opposition to that disastrous trade agreement. What I knew then, and what many working people knew, was that allowing American companies to move to China and hire workers there at starvation wages would spur a race to the bottom, resulting in the loss of good-paying union jobs in the United States and lower wages for American workers. And that’s exactly what happened. In the roughly two decades that followed, around two million American jobs were lost, more than 40,000 factories shut down, and American workers experienced wage stagnation—even while corporations made billions and executives were richly rewarded. In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential election in part by campaigning against U.S. trade policies, tapping into the real economic struggles of many voters with his phony and divisive populism.
Meanwhile, needless to say, freedom, democracy, and human rights in China have not expanded. They have been severely curtailed as China has moved in a more authoritarian direction, and China has become increasingly aggressive on the global stage. The pendulum of conventional wisdom in Washington has now swung from being far too optimistic about the opportunities presented by unfettered trade with China to being far too hawkish about the threats posed by the richer, stronger, more authoritarian China that has been one result of that increased trade.
In February 2020, the Brookings analyst Bruce Jones wrote that “China’s rise—to the position of the world’s second-largest economy, its largest energy consumer, and its number two defense spender—has unsettled global affairs” and that mobilizing “to confront the new realities of great power rivalry is the challenge for American statecraft in the period ahead.” A few months ago, my conservative colleague Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, compared the threat from China to the one posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War: “Once again, America confronts a powerful totalitarian adversary that seeks to dominate Eurasia and remake the world order,” he argued. And just as Washington reorganized the U.S. national security architecture after World War II to prepare for conflict with Moscow, Cotton wrote, “today, America’s long-term economic, industrial, and technological efforts need to be updated to reflect the growing threat posed by Communist China.” And just last month, Kurt Campbell, the U.S. National Security Council’s top Asia policy official, said that “the period that was broadly described as engagement [with China] has come to an end” and that going forward, “the dominant paradigm is going to be competition.”
DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE
Twenty years ago, the American economic and political establishment was wrong about China. Today, the consensus view has changed, but it is once again wrong. Now, instead of extolling the virtues of free trade and openness toward China, the establishment beats the drums for a new Cold War, casting China as an existential threat to the United States. We are already hearing politicians and representatives of the military-industrial complex using this as the latest pretext for larger and larger defense budgets.
I believe it is important to challenge this new consensus—just as it was important to challenge the old one. The Chinese government is surely guilty of many policies and practices that I oppose and that all Americans should oppose: the theft of technology, the suppression of workers’ rights and the press, the repression taking place in Tibet and Hong Kong, Beijing’s threatening behavior toward Taiwan, and the Chinese government’s atrocious policies toward the Uyghur people. The United States should also be concerned about China’s aggressive global ambitions. The United States should continue to press these issues in bilateral talks with the Chinese government and in multilateral institutions such as the UN Human Rights Council. That approach would be far more credible and effective if the United States upholds a consistent position on human rights toward its own allies and partners.
Organizing our foreign policy around a zero-sum global confrontation with China, however, will fail to produce better Chinese behavior and be politically dangerous and strategically counterproductive. The rush to confront China has a very recent precedent: the global “war on terror.” In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the American political establishment quickly concluded that antiterrorism had to become the overriding focus of U.S. foreign policy. Almost two decades and $6 trillion later, it’s become clear that national unity was exploited to launch a series of endless wars that proved enormously costly in human, economic, and strategic terms and that gave rise to xenophobia and bigotry in U.S. politics—the brunt of it borne by American Muslim and Arab communities. It is no surprise that today, in a climate of relentless fearmongering about China, the country is experiencing an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes. Right now, the United States is more divided than it has been in recent history. But the experience of the last two decades should have shown us that Americans must resist the temptation to try to forge national unity through hostility and fear.
A BETTER WAY FORWARD
The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has rightly recognized the rise of authoritarianism as a major threat to democracy. The primary conflict between democracy and authoritarianism, however, is taking place not between countries but within them—including in the United States. And if democracy is going to win out, it will do so not on a traditional battlefield but by demonstrating that democracy can actually deliver a better quality of life for people than authoritarianism can. That is why we must revitalize American democracy, restoring people’s faith in government by addressing the long-neglected needs of working families. We must create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and combating climate change. We must address the crises we face in health care, housing, education, criminal justice, immigration, and so many other areas. We must do this not only because it will make us more competitive with China or any other country but because it will better serve the needs of the American people.
Although the primary concern of the U.S. government is the security and prosperity of the American people, we should also recognize that in our deeply interconnected world, our security and prosperity are connected to people everywhere. To that end, it is in our interest to work with other wealthy nations to raise living standards around the world and diminish the grotesque economic inequality that authoritarian forces everywhere exploit to build their own political power and undermine democracy.
The Biden administration has pushed for a global minimum corporate tax. This is a good step toward ending the race to the bottom. But we must think even bigger: a global minimum wage, which would strengthen the rights of workers around the world, providing millions more with the chance for a decent, dignified life and diminishing the ability of multinational corporations to exploit the world’s neediest populations. To help poor countries raise their living standards as they integrate into the global economy, the United States and other rich countries should significantly increase their investments in sustainable development.
For the American people to thrive, others around the world need to believe that the United States is their ally and that their successes are our successes. Biden is doing exactly the right thing by providing $4 billion in support for the global vaccine initiative known as COVAX, by sharing 500 million vaccine doses with the world, and by backing a WTO intellectual property waiver that would enable poorer countries to produce vaccines themselves. China deserves acknowledgment for the steps it has taken to provide vaccines, but the United States can do even more. When people around the world see the American flag, it should be attached to packages of lifesaving aid, not drones and bombs.
Creating true security and prosperity for working people in the United States and China alike demands building a more equitable global system that prioritizes human needs over corporate greed and militarism. In the United States, handing billions more in taxpayer dollars to corporations and the Pentagon while inflaming bigotry will not serve these goals.
Americans must not be naive about China’s repression, disregard for human rights, and global ambitions. I strongly believe that the American people have an interest in strengthening global norms that respect the rights and dignity of all people—in the United States, in China, and around the world. I fear, however, that the growing bipartisan push for a confrontation with China will set back those goals and risks empowering authoritarian, ultranationalistic forces in both countries. It will also deflect attention from the shared common interests the two countries have in combating truly existential threats such as climate change, pandemics, and the destruction that a nuclear war would bring.
Developing a mutually beneficial relationship with China will not be easy. But we can do better than a new Cold War.
US linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky during a press conference in Brazil, 2018. (photo: Heuler Andrey/AFP/Getty Images)
Noam Chomsky: The Elites Are Fighting a Vicious Class War All the Time
Ana Kasparian and Nando Vila, Jacobin
Excerpt: "One recent study found that for about 90 percent of the population, there's essentially no correlation between their income and decisions by their representatives - that is, they're fundamentally unrepresented."
Noam Chomsky talks to Jacobin about why working-class politics can secure universal health care, climate justice, and an end to nuclear weapons — if we’re willing to fight for them.
n 1967, Noam Chomsky emerged as a leading critic of the Vietnam War with a New York Review of Books essay critiquing US foreign policy’s ivory tower establishment. As many academics rationalized genocide, Chomsky defended a simple principle: “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”
A groundbreaking linguist, Chomsky has done more to live up to this maxim than almost any other contemporary intellectual. His political writings have laid bare the horrors of neoliberalism, the injustices of endless war, and the propaganda of the corporate media, earning him a place on Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List” and in the surveillance files of the CIA. At ninety-two, Chomsky remains an essential voice in the anti-capitalist movements his ideas helped inspire.
Ana Kasparian and Nando Vila interviewed Chomsky for Jacobin’s Weekends YouTube show earlier this year. In their conversation, Chomsky reminds us that history is a process of continuous struggle, and that the working-class politics needed to secure universal health care, climate justice, and denuclearization are out there — if we’re willing to fight for them.
AK: Let’s start with a big question — why does Congress continuously tell the American people that it will not deliver on policies that have overwhelming public support?
NC: Well, one place to look always is: “Where’s the money? Who funds Congress?” Actually, there’s a very fine, careful study of this by the leading scholar who deals with funding issues and politics, Thomas Ferguson. He and his colleagues did a study in which they investigated a simple question: “What’s the correlation over many years between campaign funding and electability to Congress?” The correlation is almost a straight line. That’s the kind of close correlation that you rarely get in the social sciences: greater the funding, higher the electability.
And in fact, we all know what happens when a congressional representative gets elected. Their first day in office, they start making phone calls to the potential donors for their next election. Meanwhile, hordes of corporate lobbyists descend on their offices. Their staff are often young kids, totally overwhelmed by the resources, the wealth, the power, of the massive lobbyists who pour in. Out of that comes legislation, which the representative later signs — maybe even looks at occasionally, when he can get off the phone with the donors. What kind of system do you expect to emerge from this?
One recent study found that for about 90 percent of the population, there’s essentially no correlation between their income and decisions by their representatives — that is, they’re fundamentally unrepresented. This extends earlier work by Martin Gilens, Benjamin Page, and others who found pretty similar results, and the general picture is clear: the working class and most of the middle class are basically unrepresented.
The decisions of representatives reflect a very highly concentrated amount of campaign money, and other financial pressures. I mean, if you’re a congressional representative, and you’re going to leave Congress one of these days, where do you go? Do you become a truck driver? Secretary? You know where you go, and you know what the reasons are. If you voted the right way, you’ve got a cushy future ahead of you.
There are many, many devices by which you can ensure that a large majority of the population is unrepresented, and, furthermore, robbed — robbed massively. The RAND Corporation, ultrarespectable, a couple of months ago did a study of what they call the “transfer of wealth” from the working class and the middle class — or, more accurately, the robbery of the public — since the neoliberal assault began around 1980. Their estimate for how much wealth has moved from the lower 90 percent of the income scale to the very top is $47 trillion.
It’s not small change, and it’s a vast underestimate. When Reagan opened the spigots for corporate robbery many devices became available: for example, tax havens and shell companies, which were illegal before that, when the Treasury Department enforced the law. How much money was stolen that way? That’s mostly secret, but there are some reasonable estimates. An IMF study came out recently that estimated $35 trillion, roughly — just from tax havens — over forty years.
Keep adding this theft up. It’s not pennies, and it affects people’s lives. People are angry, and they’re resentful for very good reasons: they’re perfectly arranged for a demagogue to come along — Trump-style — who holds up a banner with one hand saying, “I love you, I’m going to save you,” and with the other hand stabs you in the back to pay off the rich and powerful.
NV: After Bernie, where should leftists direct our energies to address these immense problems which you just outlined?
NC: The first thing we should remember is that the Sanders campaign was a remarkable success. Within a couple of years, Sanders and others working alongside him have managed to shift the range of issues that are at the center of attention very far toward the progressive side. That’s quite significant. They did so with no funding, no corporate support, no media support — the media became mildly friendly to Sanders after he lost the nomination, not before. Before, it was kind of like what happened to [Jeremy] Corbyn in the UK: powerful forces were determined to stop anything to the left of the most mild social democracy.
Looking back at the success of the Sanders campaign, I think one answer to your question is “keep at it.” Remember, a terrible mistake was made when Obama was elected: namely, a lot of the Left believed in him. Obama had a tremendous amount of popular support, especially from young people — lots of young activists and organizers worked to get him elected. After the election, what happened? He told them, “Go home.” And unfortunately, they went home. Within two years, Obama had completely betrayed his constituency, and it showed in the 2010 election.
It’s not that the right wing won the labor vote; the Democrats lost it — for good reasons. In 2010, even union voters didn’t support the Democratic candidate; they saw what Obama had done. Well, we shouldn’t make that mistake again, certainly not with Biden. Biden is kind of a weak read, in my opinion; he can be pressed. There are some quite good people in the Biden administration, especially among the economic advisors, and they can be pressed.
Take climate change. There isn’t any more important issue. If we don’t deal with the environmental catastrophe soon, everything else is moot; there won’t be anything to talk about. A lot of pressure on the Biden-Harris campaign from the Sunrise Movement and others did manage to press their program toward the progressive side. Not far enough — but, still, their program is the best that’s ever been produced.
But the DNC started hacking away at it. Through August, when you Googled the Democratic Party climate program, you got the Biden-Harris program. The last time I saw it was August 22. The next time I looked, a couple of days later, it wasn’t there. What you got instead was “how to donate to the DNC.” I can only speculate as to what happened, but I think there’s a struggle going on. And it could continue if the Left doesn’t make the Obama mistake, and believes those who are in power and their pretty words.
The same is true of the corporate sector, which is running scared. They’re concerned with what they call “reputational risks,” meaning “the peasants are coming with their pitchforks.” All across the corporate world — at Davos, and at the Business Roundtable — there are discussions of how “We have to confess to the public that we’ve done the wrong things. We haven’t paid enough attention to stakeholders, workforce, and community, but now we realize our errors. Now we’re becoming what, in the 1950s, were called ‘soulful corporations,’ really dedicated to the common good.” So, now we have lots of “soulful corporations,” appealing to the public with their great humanity, sometimes taking measures like withdrawing funding from fossil fuel companies; they can be pressed.
I don’t like the system, you don’t like the system, but it exists, and we have to work within it. We can’t say, “I don’t want it. Let’s have another system that doesn’t exist.” We can only build a new system through pressure from inside and from outside.
So, for example, there’s no reason to avoid working to create an alternative political and social framework by creating a new party or worker-owned enterprises and cooperatives. The point is that there is a whole array of options open to us — and they all have to be pursued.
AK: I agree that Bernie Sanders was certainly incredibly successful in waking people up so that many more people thought about politics in class terms. He also did spark quite a bit of anger, because realizing just how much the system is rigged against the average American infuriates people. I think people are getting incredibly impatient with our lack of influence on our lawmakers.
NC: Well, the lack of influence goes back in the United States roughly two hundred fifty years. So, we can start with the Constitution, which was established explicitly on the principle of preventing democracy. There wasn’t any secret about it. In fact, the major scholarly study on the Constitutional Convention, by Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law professor, is called The Framers’ Coup, and it’s about the coup against democracy by the Framers.
The theme of the of the founders was expressed quite well by John Jay, who was the first Supreme Court chief justice: “those who own the country ought to govern it.” That’s what we see today: those who own the country have succeeded in governing it.
This hasn’t been a uniform procedure; there has been plenty of resistance, and lots of victories have been won. During my childhood, for example, in the 1930s, there were major victories, mainly spearheaded by the organized labor movement (CIO organizing, militant strikes, militant labor actions), a moderately sympathetic administration, and political activism of all sorts.
The United States moved toward moderate social democracy — we’re still enjoying some of the benefits of that, though a lot of it’s been chipped away. Other periods of American history were similar. In the late nineteenth century, the Knights of Labor — a populist movement that has nothing to do with what’s called “populism” today — and radical farmers were getting together a major movement, which was finally crushed by state and corporate force, but left a residue.
This is fundamentally a class struggle that goes on through history, and now we’re in a particular stage of it. We keep struggling, we make improvements, there’s some regression, and we keep going. Slavery was overcome after hundreds of years of struggle, and then it came back in another form — the residue is still there. But it’s not that there’s no victory at all. Things are better than they were because of constant struggle.
In fact, this country is a lot better than it was sixty years ago, mainly because of activism in the sixties. Just remember what the country was like in the 1960s. Federal funded housing was denied by law to African Americans, not because the liberal senators wanted that, but because you couldn’t get anything through the Southern Democratic stranglehold on policy. There were anti-sodomy laws into this century. Lots of things have changed.
It’s not easy, but if you say, “Well, we haven’t gotten where we wanted; I’m going to quit,” you just guarantee that the worst is going to happen. It’s a constant struggle. Take, say, Tony Mazzocchi — one of the heroes of modern labor, head of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers [International] Union, one of the first serious environmentalists in the country. His constituents at the front line were being murdered by pollution, destruction of the environment, and so on. This is in the early seventies, way before the environmental movement took off. His union was working toward dealing with the environmental crisis, and it moved on to try to establish a labor party in the nineties. It could have worked, but it didn’t make it.
The neoliberal assault — beginning with Reagan, on through Clinton, Obama — was designed to destroy labor. Reagan’s campaign opened with an attack on the labor unions. Thatcher did exactly the same thing in England. The people behind the neoliberal assault understood what they were doing: you have to eliminate the ability of laboring people to defend themselves.
Clinton extended this; his neoliberal globalization policies were designed to protect investors and to crush labor, and they succeeded. It was similar to the thirties. In the 1920s, labor had been virtually crushed. There was a successful militant labor movement in the early part of the twentieth century, but after Woodrow Wilson’s red scare, it was almost destroyed. In the 1920s, there was almost nothing there, but it came roaring back in the thirties — that’s what led to the New Deal policies, the mild social democracy that we still benefit from.
We can rebuild again. In fact, it’s beginning to happen in quite interesting ways. So, labor had been so crushed by neoliberal policies that there were barely any strikes. Workers were afraid to go on strike; they’d be destroyed. Strikes started to pick up in red states among nonunionized labor. Teachers in West Virginia and Arizona had enormous public support.
In Northern Arizona, when the teachers began the strike, there were posters all over lawns saying, “Support the Teachers!” And the teachers weren’t just calling for higher salaries — which they very much deserve — but for improving the educational system, which has been hit by the neoliberal plague. Privatization, defunding, regimentation, teaching to the test — all of these things were bipartisan. Republicans are more extreme, so Betsy DeVos was almost openly devoted to destroying the whole system. But Obama’s policies weren’t much better.
Here’s the teachers’ strike, with lots of popular support. There have also been nurses’ strikes, service union strikes, a big GM strike, and more of that could happen. The destruction of labor has been a major factor in creating extreme inequality. There are some mainstream economists like Lawrence Summers who have concluded that it’s the major factor in extreme inequality — just taking away the ability of workers to defend themselves. Certainly, it’s a major factor that could allow alternative political parties like Mazzocchi’s to come back.
Pressure on the Democrats to move to the Left — like the kind of thing that [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez’s Squad and others are doing — can have an effect, but it’s got to have a lot of popular action behind it. If the troops go home, the party’s going to move to the Right. There’s one force that’s relentless: the business classes are Marxists, and they’re fighting a vicious class war all the time. They never stop. If the rest of the population leaves the struggle, you know what’s going to happen. In fact, we’ve seen forty years of it.
NV: I want to ask about that class struggle, because [Thomas] Piketty, for example, has pointed out that across the Western democracies the class composition of parties has been shifting in pretty striking ways.
What do you make of that phenomenon as it’s happened here in the United States — but also in Europe — where traditional left-wing parties are becoming parties more and more of the educated elites, and the working classes are getting shut out?
NC: Well, let’s start with the United States. So, by the late 1970s — the late [Jimmy] Carter years — the Democrats basically told the working class, “We don’t have any interest in you.” The last gasp of pro-labor activity in the Democratic Party was the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978. Carter didn’t veto it, but he watered it down so it was toothless. From that point on, the Democrats essentially abandoned the working class, aside from a few gestures here and there.
When Clinton came, NAFTA was rammed through in secret over the objections of the labor movement. They weren’t even informed until the last minute of what the framework was: investor rights agreements. The Labor Advisory Committee did come out with an alternative program for NAFTA, saying “Here’s a much better way to do it. The executive version is going to lead to a low-growth, low-wage economy. Here’s a way to do it with a high-growth, high-wage economy.”
It happened that their program was almost the same as that of the Congress’s own research agency, the Office of Technology Assessment. Nobody paid attention to them; the executive branch didn’t care. They wanted their version of NAFTA, which was basically an investor rights agreement that sets working people in competition with each other without rights.
It turned out that under Clinton’s NAFTA, corporations were able to break organizing efforts at a very high level — about 50 percent of them were broken simply by threats to move the enterprise to Mexico. The threats weren’t serious, but they were enough to break the organizing effort. This happens to be illegal, but when you have a criminal state, you can carry out illegal acts. There’s a good study of this by Kate Bronfenbrenner, a labor economist at Cornell, who found what I just described — that about 50 percent of organizing efforts were broken illegally, just by threats to move the enterprise. That’s only one example.
In 2008, labor voted for Obama; in 2010, it was gone — labor had seen what his promises meant, all right. This was the midst of a huge financial crisis caused by the collapse of the housing market. Congress under [George W.] Bush, in fact, had passed TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] legislation to do something about it.
The legislation has two components. One was to bail out the perpetrators of the crisis: the banks who had caused the crisis with predatory lending practices and other devious semi-criminal actions. The other part of the legislation was to bail out the victims: people that lost their homes under foreclosures, lost their jobs.
Anybody who knows American history and politics could have predicted which half of the legislation was going to be implemented by President Obama. Within two years, the working class — even the unionized working class — had said, “This party isn’t working for us. They’re our enemy.”
Where can you go? You can go to the guys who claim that they’re going to bring back traditional America and get you jobs. They’re not going to do it, of course, but they at least claim to. You take a look at Trump voters; they have been carefully studied. A lot of them say, “Yeah, we know he’s a jerk, he’s not going to do anything. But at least he says that he likes us.”
He stands up and says, “I’m with you. I want you to do good. I act like you.” Like George W. Bush — you may recall that every weekend, he would go off to Texas and his farm, and be filmed cutting brush in hundred degree temperatures to show that he’s a real ordinary guy. After he left office, I don’t think he ever went back there.
The most careful studies I’ve seen of Trump voters are those of Anthony DiMaggio, a left social scientist. He did a recent analysis on what’s known so far about the 2020 Trump voters, and it looks like, once again, apart from the evangelicals and the white supremacists, the main voting base for Trump is basically petty bourgeois with incomes from $100,000 to $200,000. That’s not working people — that’s small businessmen, insurance salesmen, and so on. That seems to be the main base, and it seems to be the only part that increased substantially since 2016.
A lot of working people think, “Well, at least Trump says something nice to us. Democrats don’t do anything.” Take, say, South Texas: there’s been a lot of study of why South Texas, which hadn’t voted for a Republican for a hundred years — since [Warren] Harding — moved toward Trump. These are Mexican-American communities. How come they broke with a hundred years of voting Democrat? First of all, the Democrats didn’t make the slightest effort to do any organizing: “They’re Hispanic. They vote for us.” People don’t like that, you know.
But there was a scarier reason. These are oil-producing areas. All that they heard was “Biden wants to take away our jobs because a bunch of pointy-headed rich liberals claim there’s a climate crisis.” If the Democrats cared at all about working people, they would have been down there saying, “Look, there’s a climate crisis, and we are going to have to transition away from fossil fuels, period. But you can have better jobs, better lives, a better economy, by moving toward working on changing the industries — maybe under your own control — to sustainable energy and constructive development.”
That’s what organizers do, okay. The Democrats didn’t bother; the working class is not their constituency. So, South Texans voted for the guy who says, “I’m gonna bring your jobs back.”
AK: There’s this ongoing debate about whether or not the Republican Party can legitimately and sincerely become the party of the working class in the future. Obviously, we’re skeptical, but there has been a rhetorical shift.
NC: First of all, workers have to have something to vote for. If the Democrats say, “We don’t care about you. We’re the party of Wall Street and rich professionals. We have Hollywood stars at our events, and who cares about you,” they’ll vote for the guy who says, “I like you. I act like you. I hate the elite.” They’ll vote for that guy even if he’s not doing anything for them, and, in fact, screwing them.
If you want to look at these Republicans who claim to be pro–working class, look at how they vote. Look at how they voted on the one legislative achievement of the Trump administration: the tax scam, which gave a huge amount of money to the very rich and is stabbing the working class in the back.
How did they vote on the way the CARES program was administrated — so that funding goes to banks, who then decide how to distribute it, and they give it to their rich clients? Take a look at the actual legislative actions. It’s very easy to get up and say, “I’m for the workers,” you know? Maybe people will say, “Well, at least he says he likes us.”
People are voting just out of frustration if they vote at all. Remember, almost half the population didn’t even bother. So, unless there’s a constructive alternative, people aren’t going to join a movement. Yet during the Sanders campaign, most liberal commentators said, “His proposals are very good. But they’re too radical for the American people.”
What proposals are too radical? Take a look at Sanders’s programs: the top one was universal medical care. Do you know of any other country that doesn’t have universal medical care? One of the chief correspondents at the Financial Times, Rana Foroohar, wrote a column in which, half-jokingly, she said that if Sanders was in Germany, he could be running on the Christian Democrat program, the right-wing party. Of course they’re in favor of universal health care — who isn’t?
The other program is free higher education. Again, you find it almost everywhere, and in the most high-performing countries: Finland, Europe, Mexico, it’s all over the place. That’s too radical for the American people? I mean, that’s an insult for the American population that’s coming from the left end of the mainstream spectrum. Well, the Left — the authentic left — ought to be able to break through that and say that Sanders has programs that wouldn’t have much surprised [Dwight] Eisenhower.
Eisenhower was strongly pro–New Deal. His position was that anyone who questions the New Deal doesn’t belong in the American political system. During the neoliberal years, things have moved so far to the Right at the elite level — at the power level — that it’s hard to remember what was normal not long before. The Left can reach people by reviving the labor movement, moving toward the labor party, pressing the liberal part of the Democratic Party toward moderately social democratic ends — particularly on things like the climate.
I should also mention the issue of nuclear weapons. It’s not talked about. It’s a major threat to our existence. The threat is increasing enormously. One of Trump’s many crimes was to dismantle the whole arms-control system, and initiate moves toward creating very dangerous new weapons systems — those moves have to be terminated quickly, or we’re in serious trouble. We have to get the Left together on these issues. You can differ on other things, but there are some major things that are just essential — literally — for human survival.
NV: We all agree that climate change is an existential threat, but it just seems like we won’t be able to truly fix the climate problem until we move beyond capitalism in some way, which traditionally we’ve called socialism. Do you think it’s still useful to think about socialism as a sort of political horizon?
NC: It’s useful, but there are some facts we have to remember. One of them is timescale. We have a decade or two to deal decisively with the environmental crisis. We’re not going to overthrow capitalism in a couple of decades. You can continue working for socialism — but you have to recognize that the solution to the climate crisis is going to have to come within some kind of regimented capitalist system, not the neoliberal system.
There are a variety of kinds of capitalism. So, you go back to the pre-neoliberal period — this period of so-called regimented capitalism — and within that framework of serious government control of the destructive excesses of unleashed capitalism, you have a chance to proceed.
Meanwhile, we should be doing exactly what you said, trying to undermine capitalism. Take the fundamental evil of capitalism, which was always understood by traditional socialists — namely, the fact that you have to have a job.
We consider having a job a wonderful thing. Working people in the early Industrial Revolution regarded it as an obscenity, a fundamental attack on essential human rights and dignity. Now, that was such a strong position that it was a slogan of the Republican Party under Lincoln: that wage labor differs from slavery only in that it’s temporary, until you can become a free person.
Well, freedom can be implemented by worker control of the enterprises of which they are a part. You can get it in one step, as in worker-owned enterprises, which are proliferating — but you can get it by a series of steps, like [Elizabeth] Warren and Sanders’s proposals for worker representation on corporate managing boards.
Worker representation is not very radical. Germany has it — a conservative country — but it is a step forward. You can move forward beyond that with actual direct action on the ground — for example, creating worker-owned enterprises — to changing the way in which the capitalist system works.
If you have a carbon tax, don’t do it like they did it in France, which led to the yellow vest movement. A carbon tax which is designed to hit the working class will lead to an uprising. You can have a carbon tax in which the revenue is returned to the public in a progressive manner — then it benefits the working class. Yes, you pay a little more for gas, but you get more in return.
Same with health care. You save a huge amount of money if we go to a universal health care system, but you’re going to pay higher taxes. Those are the tests for the Left: educational, organizational, activist. I think this is a tremendous range of opportunities available. But it’s not enough to know what to do — you have to do it.
AK: How do you remain optimistic that we can fight successfully for real change that benefits ordinary people?
NC: Well, one easy way is to just look at what I see on the screen: people committed to struggling for a better world. And there are plenty of people like you.
I can’t do it much more — I’m getting too old — but I used to travel around to some of the poorest, most depressed areas of the world: Laos, Southern Colombia, Kurdish areas in Turkey, Palestinian refugee camps, the most miserable places you can find. Plenty of people are optimistic. They don’t give up in comparably worse conditions than ours. We have opportunities they can’t dream of. They don’t give up, and they’re struggling.
You go to a poor rural community in Colombia, hours away from the highway. You get to the community, and the first thing you see is a small cemetery with graves, white crosses, for people who were killed in the latest paramilitary attack. Get into the town: “Welcome, have a meal.” Go to a meeting, and they’re talking about how to save the mountain next to them from corporate predators who will destroy their water supply.
But they’re struggling optimistically. And when you see people like that everywhere — here, too — how can you not share in their optimism, with all of our privileges and advantages?
Authoritarians. (photo: Amanda Northrop/Vox)
Call It Authoritarianism
Zack Beauchamp, Vox
Beauchamp writes: "American democracy is in a bad way, and the Republican Party is the reason why."
The Republican Party has embraced an agenda that rigs the rules in their favor. There’s a name for that behavior.
merican democracy is in a bad way, and the Republican Party is the reason why.
Blocking an inquiry into the January 6 attack on the Capitol, embracing Trump’s “Big Lie” that the election was stolen, making it easier for partisans to tamper with the process of counting votes: These are not the actions of a party committed to the basic idea of open, representative government.
It’s common to call this GOP behavior “anti-democratic,” but the description can only go so far. It tells us what they’re moving America away from, but not where they want to take it. The term “minority rule” is closer, but euphemistic; it puts the Republican actions in the same category as a Supreme Court ruling, countermajoritarian moves inside a democratic framework rather than something fundamentally opposed to it.
It’s worth being clear about this: The GOP has become an authoritarian party pushing an authoritarian policy agenda.
There are many kinds of authoritarian systems, and many ways to become one of them. In the United States, the threat that looms is a slide into what scholars call “competitive authoritarianism”: a system that still holds elections, but under profoundly unfair conditions that systematically favor one side. That process, of one party stacking the deck in its favor over the course of years, isn’t unique — we’ve seen it in countries across the world in recent years, in places as diverse as Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela.
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Understanding what’s happening in the US as something fundamentally similar to what’s happened elsewhere — using the a-word, unflinchingly — helps us not only diagnose the most dangerous policy steps the GOP is taking, but also truly appreciate the gravity of the situation in which America has found itself.
We are suffering from the same rot that has brought down democracy in other countries: a party that has decided it no longer wants to play by the rules and that would instead prefer to rule as authoritarians rather than share power with its opponents.
“All of us, as citizens, have to recognize that the path towards an undemocratic America is not going to happen in just one bang. It happens in a series of steps,” former President Barack Obama said in a CNN interview last Monday.
We’re not where Hungary is, thankfully. Democrats can and still do win power, as they did in 2020.
But the playing field is indisputably tilted against them — and only growing more so. The escalation in authoritarian behavior since January 6, from both national and state Republicans, shows that things are worse than even some pessimistic observers have feared.
It’s happened elsewhere. It can happen here, too.
The varieties of authoritarianism
When people think of authoritarian governments, they typically think of police states and 20th-century totalitarianism. But “authoritarianism” is actually a broad term, encompassing very different governments united mostly by the fact that they do not transfer power through free and fair elections. Some of these governments, like modern China, are violently and nakedly repressive; others control their population through subtler means.
Competitive authoritarian governments fall into the latter category — so closely resembling a democracy on paper that many of their own citizens believe they’re still living in one.
The concept was first developed in a 2002 paper by Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and the University of Toronto’s Lucan Way, two leading scholars of democracy. They identified competitive authoritarian systems as ones that hold elections but ensure that they’re fundamentally unfair — stacked in the incumbent party’s favor so heavily that the people don’t have real agency over who rules them.
“Incumbents routinely abuse state resources, deny the opposition adequate media coverage, harass opposition candidates and their supporters, and in some cases manipulate electoral results,” Levitsky and Way write. “Regimes characterized by such abuses cannot be called democratic.”
Yet competitive authoritarian systems survive in part by convincing citizens that they are living in a democracy. That’s how they maintain their legitimacy and prevent popular uprisings. As such, they do not conduct the kind of obvious sham elections held in places like Bashar al-Assad’s Syria (he won the 2021 contest with 95 percent of the “vote”).
In competitive authoritarianism, the opposition does have some ability to win a bit of power through, well, competition — even if the scope of their possible victories are limited.
It’s a tricky balance for the regime to pull off: rigging elections enough to maintain power indefinitely while still permitting enough democracy that citizens don’t rise up in outrage. Many competitive authoritarian regimes have collapsed under the stress, either transitioning to democracy (like Taiwan) or forcefully repressing the opposition and becoming a more traditional autocracy (like Belarus).
But many systems manage to survive. In a 2020 paper revisiting their work, Levitsky and Way found that 10 out of 35 competitive authoritarian regimes they identified in 2002 remained in place nearly two decades later. And new ones had emerged in countries that had previously been seen as solidly democratic — most notably Hungary, which is today one of the most effective competitive authoritarian systems in the world.
Hungary is, as it happens, one of the foreign countries most admired by American conservative intellectuals. In the 2020 paper, Levitsky and Way observe that features of its system are starting to show up in America.
“Competitive authoritarianism is not only thriving but inching westward. No democracy can be taken for granted,” they write. “Similar tendencies have even reached the United States, where the Trump administration borrowed the ‘deep state’ discourse that autocrats in Hungary and Turkey used to justify purges and the packing of the courts and other key state institutions.“
After the events of January 6 and subsequent Republican pushes to steal the election, I reached out to Levitsky to see how his thinking had evolved.
“I’m terrified,” he told me in a phone call. “I think Republicans are going to steal the next election.”
The GOP and competitive authoritarianism
Happily, the United States still passes the most basic test of whether a system is democratic: whether the public can vote out its leaders. But it is hard to deny that the Republican Party has begun chipping away at that baseline principle, using the flaws in our political system to entrench their power.
Republicans already have unfair structural advantages, due to our outmoded Constitution. The nature of the Electoral College means that the key battlegrounds, like Pennsylvania, are considerably redder than the country as a whole. The Senate is so biased against dense urban states that under half of Americans control 82 percent of Senate seats. The combination of anti-urban bias and intentional gerrymandering means that, by one measure, the GOP has had a leg up in House elections since 1968.
The current Republican campaign builds on these inherent tendencies of the US constitutional system toward minority rule to push us toward something more properly termed authoritarian. It combines intentional state-level election rigging with the abuse of countermajoritarian institutions at the federal level to ensure GOP control of the nationwide levers of power, all the while working to delegitimize the press and other non-state institutions that could challenge it.
Some of these developments, like extreme gerrymandering and efforts to keep their supporters in a propaganda bubble insulated from nonpartisan media, are long-running. But many of the most concerning developments, ones that directly echo the approach of competitive authoritarian regimes abroad, are new.
In Hungary, one of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s key power-consolidating moves was stacking the country’s election administration agency with cronies from his Fidesz party, allowing the party to more easily rig the game in its favor.
In 2021, the GOP has started subverting election agencies in earnest; a new report from three pro-democracy groups found that 14 Republican-controlled states have passed a total of 24 bills this year interfering with election administration. Georgia’s SB 202 is perhaps the most egregious, allowing the Republican-dominated state legislature to take over the vote-counting process from county officials.
Another important Orbán tactic has been abusing regulatory policy to punish businesses that threaten the party’s hold on political power.
In 2021, the GOP embraced this idea at both the state and federal level. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a leading 2024 presidential contender, recently signed a flagrantly unconstitutional bill that levies heavy fines on platforms that ban politicians like Donald Trump. In April, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that “corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs.” Three GOP senators proposed a bill stripping Major League Baseball of its antitrust exemption as an explicit punishment for its decision to pull the All-Star Game out of Atlanta to protest SB 202.
And then, of course, there’s the January 6 uprising and the Republican embrace of its fundamental premise: that the 2020 election was somehow illegitimate.
All competitive authoritarian regimes need some kind of ideological justification for anti-democratic politics, something to rally its supporters against their enemies. In Hungary, it’s a combination of nationalism, xenophobia, and a defense of traditional gender norms. The GOP has long employed elements of all of these but now has united around a more straightforward cause: American elections are corrupt, and Republican efforts to make elections unfair are actually efforts to fix them.
The point here is not that the GOP’s anti-democratic inclinations are completely new: In fact, they’ve evolved over decades. But the crucible of the Trump presidency and the January 6 election have forged these inchoate notions into an actual competitive authoritarian agenda.
Authoritarianism is as American as apple pie
Of course, the United States is different in many important respects from a place like Hungary. One important difference: our decentralized electoral system.
The US Constitution devolved election administration to the states, giving local legislatures control over the rules around elections and the process of actually tallying up the votes. State governments are what political scientist Phil Rocco calls “the infrastructure of democracy” — the place where the terms of political competition at the national level are set.
In theory, this should serve as a bulwark against the emergence of competitive authoritarianism, preventing one faction from rewriting the rules in their favor in one fell swoop. Historically, Rocco points out, it’s often worked the opposite way: The decentralized system enabled the creation of Jim Crow, which turned Southern states into authoritarian enclaves marked by one-party Democratic rule for decades.
“Racial apartheid in the South constructed a ‘Jim Crow Congress’; insulated from electoral competition, Southern committee chairs became the fulcrum of national policymaking — foreclosing the New Deal’s social democratic aspirations,” he writes in a 2020 essay. “Episodes of democratic collapse at the state level have had profound reverberations for national politics.”
The threat in the United States is the reemergence of this sort of bottom-up, state-level authoritarianism that has national electoral repercussions. It’s a subtle threat, one that comes into being quietly and incrementally — as is often the case when a democracy devolves into competitive authoritarianism.
“If people think that there is one day that you wake up and you’re in a competitive authoritarian system, that’s not the case,” says Hadas Aron, a political scientist at New York University who studies weak and failing democracies. “It’s actually complicated and a very, very long process.”
Experts disagree on how close we are to crossing the line. Levitsky, for example, thinks that Republicans could fatally undermine the democratic system as soon as 2024, using a combination of state-level interference with vote counts and congressional action to illegitimately block a Democratic victory.
Aron, by contrast, thinks we’re still quite far from the point of no return — that American democratic institutions are far more vibrant than their Hungarian peers were just before their collapse.
But even Aron, a longtime skeptic of the idea that America is on the path to authoritarianism, is rethinking her views in light of the GOP’s increased commitment to anti-democratic politics since January 6.
“I can’t say anything good” about Republican behavior, she tells me. “They want to stay in power and they want to change the system so it will benefit them as much as possible.”
This view is approaching a consensus among experts. A recent letter by 100 leading scholars of democracy warned that “Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures. ... Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.”
Yet many of our elected officials — including key Democrats — do not recognize the urgency of the crisis.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) told Forbes last week that “if democracy were in jeopardy, I would want to protect it. [But] I don’t see it being in jeopardy right now.” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), in an op-ed justifying his decision to vote against the democracy reform bill HR 1, equated the bill with Republican efforts to undermine democracy.
“Today’s debate about how to best protect our right to vote and to hold elections, however, is not about finding common ground, but seeking partisan advantage,” Manchin writes. “Whether it is state laws that seek to needlessly restrict voting or politicians who ignore the need to secure our elections, partisan policymaking won’t instill confidence in our democracy — it will destroy it.”
This is why it’s vital to be open about what’s happening — to raise the specter of authoritarianism. Because the slide toward competitive authoritarianism is incremental, it’s easy to fall into complacency, to overlook what’s happening in front of our eyes.
When I visited Hungary three years ago, I met with Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former member of the Hungarian parliament from Fidesz who left out of disgust with Orbán’s authoritarian instincts. She told me that the European Union, which has immense financial and diplomatic leverage over the Hungarian government, largely ignored the country’s authoritarian drift after it started in 2010.
“Five years later, they understood who this person was,” she told me. “But by that time, Hungary was completely changed.”
Lina Khan, who has been a strong advocate for breaking up Big Tech companies, was recently appointed as chair of the FTC. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Big Tech Has a Battle Ahead Over Antitrust Regulation - and It's Going to Get Messy
Shirin Ghaffary, Vox
Ghaffary writes: "For several years now, Congress and regulatory agencies have warned that they could, in the future, try to break up Big Tech. In the past week, that threat got more real."
Industry groups are ramping up their fight against regulation.
On June 11, Congress introduced a sweeping set of five antitrust bills with notable levels of bipartisan support that targeted the tech giants — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — and which could potentially break up their core businesses. On June 15, in a surprise move, the White House appointed Big Tech nemesis Lina Khan to be not just a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), but the chair of the powerful federal agency that enforces antitrust laws.
“If I were running a big tech company, my pulse would be running a lot faster today than 24 hours ago,” Bill Kovacic, who led the FTC under George W. Bush’s presidency, told Recode the day after news broke that Khan would chair the FTC.
So now, even though details are still unclear about exactly what Khan or the antitrust bills could accomplish, Big Tech companies’ supporters are ramping up their defenses. And one of the main antitrust critiques that tech industry groups and lobbyists are pushing back against is the idea that Big Tech is too big and needs to be reined in.
These pro-tech groups are arguing that the current proposed legislation is a gross overreach that could damage the US economy and make it harder for everyday Americans to use popular technology that they’re used to getting for free, like email and social media. These tech industry supporters are trying to convince lawmakers that regulating Big Tech will have unintended consequences that will hurt consumers. And they’re particularly taking aim at Khan, who has publicly advocated for breaking up tech companies like Amazon.
“These proposals are ones that are not going to stand up to public scrutiny,” said Adam Kovacevich, who is CEO of the center-left tech advocacy group Chamber of Progress — which is backed by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and other tech companies. “At the end of the day, what people want from Congress is to fix the problems that are broken, not to break the things they already feel are working.”
Why industry leaders are scared of Lina Khan
Khan’s appointment to the FTC — which passed 62–28 with bipartisan support — is seen as one of the most serious regulatory threats to tech companies yet.
That’s because the FTC has broad powers to block major tech companies from buying their competitors, as well as smaller upstarts that could one day become major competitors. This means the FTC in the future could stop Facebook from, say, buying the next Instagram. And the FTC could go even further, by forcing tech companies to retroactively separate acquisitions and existing lines of businesses, like preventing Amazon from selling Echo devices and Kindles on its website (although such an effort would be hard to achieve).
And Khan made a name for herself in 2016 when she published an academic paper that laid out a legal case for breaking up Amazon. Since then, she’s been dubbed the leader of the “hipster antitrust” movement among young scholars who want to expand existing antitrust law to better target issues like corporate concentration and income inequality. Khan has also gained the support of politicians across the ideological spectrum, including progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley.
The argument in favor of separating some of Big Tech’s business lines is that some major tech companies allegedly harm consumer choice and competitors by running their own marketplaces and giving preference to their own products over those of competitors. One example that’s come up during antitrust investigations is a report that showed Amazon employees used data about third-party sellers on Amazon’s marketplace to launch Amazon-branded competing products.
Under Khan, the FTC could start aggressively pursuing cases on these types of issues. And so some tech industry supporters are taking aim at Khan’s past academic writing, which has been critical of Amazon and the economic power of other big tech companies.
“Lina Khan becoming the chair creates an air of prejudice and bias in the decisions made when it comes to technology businesses,” Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel of NetChoice, an industry group whose funders include Google, Facebook, and Amazon, told Recode.
Szabo said he believes that, because of her academic work, Khan should recuse herself from any cases involving technology. He noted that back in 1966, a pharmaceutical company called American Cyanamid successfully sued the FTC, forcing the then-chair of the committee to recuse himself from a case because of his perceived bias against the company. Khan has previously dismissed the idea that she should issue a blanket recuse from all tech cases, and said she would consult with the ethics board of the FTC if questions arise about recusal on a particular case. The FTC declined to comment on criticisms of Khan’s past work.
At this point, there’s no indication any major tech company would consider pursuing a legal case on the basis of Khan’s perceived bias, but the fact that tech industry group leaders are floating the idea shows just how alarmed they are by her powerful new role.
Regulating tech is complicated even for experts
The challenges Big Tech is facing extend beyond Khan and the FTC. Congress has introduced five wide-reaching pieces of legislation that could hurt these tech giants. Pro-Big Tech industry advocates are on the defensive, calling up lawmakers to explain why they shouldn’t support this wave of bills.
“There is an effort to educate lawmakers on the unintended and deleterious consequences of bills we’re seeing in the House,” said Szabo.
Chamber of Progress sent a letter to Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), who is leading Big Tech antitrust legislative efforts as chair of the powerful House Antitrust Subcommittee. In the letter, the group laid out potential worst-case scenarios for consumers if the legislation passes, including a future where Alexa users might not be able to order from Amazon, YouTube might have to let users upload porn, and Apple’s iPhones might be sold without any preinstalled apps.
Bloomberg seemed to confirm at least one of these scenarios when it reported on Wednesday that Cicilline said his bill would block Apple from installing its own apps on iPhones because doing so would disadvantage competing app makers. Tech analysts, lobbyists, and commentators immediately criticized this, mocking the idea of consumers buying an iPhone that’s essentially a blank slate, without apps like the Apple App Store necessary for basic smartphone functionality.
“It’s one thing to say that you’re against discrimination. It’s another thing to say that you’re against iMessage and FaceTime pre-installed on an iPhone,” said Chamber of Progress’s Kovacevich.
Cicilline’s spokesperson later wrote on Twitter that the congressman was misquoted and that the bill would not block Apple from pre-installed apps but would instead force the company to let people uninstall or switch Apple’s default apps. Currently, on newer iPhones, you can delete some — but not all — of Apple’s installed apps. You can already switch the default apps for your email and web browser on newer iPhones, although not on older ones.
The back-and-forth over the details of Cicilline’s bill just shows how messy the battle is becoming between Big Tech’s supporters and the politicians trying to regulate the industry — particularly when it involves nuanced discussions about unintended consequences that could result when you regulate popular consumer tech like iPhones.
It’s undeniable that existing antitrust laws were not designed for the internet age. But there is also an open debate among members of Congress about whether regulation could stifle innovation. It doesn’t help that some DC politicians have been notoriously slow to understand the basics of how major tech companies work, as demonstrated in public hearings in the last several years. And even for the experts, the ramifications of tweaking widely used consumer technologies can be difficult to predict.
On the other hand, politicians like Cicilline leading the charge to regulate tech argue that inaction could stifle innovation in a different way — by preventing the rise of upstarts that could challenge the status quo of the most powerful major tech companies.
It’s an ideological debate that is being fought tactically, with each side making its appeal to lawmakers, particularly to Republican lawmakers who Democrats will likely need to get these bills passed.
Chamber of Progress’s Kovacevich said his group will be launching an ad campaign that specifically targets members of Congress, to try to convince them not to support the tech antitrust bills. It’s just another step in what will be a prolonged fight.
“The question for the [Big Tech] lobbying teams is — are you going to be able to stop this? Or have your opponents circumvented you?” said former FTC leader Kovacic. “This is a contest of ideas.”
Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan. (photo: Reuters)
Pakistan PM: We Will "Absolutely Not" Allow CIA to Use Bases for Afghanistan Operations
Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu, Axios
Excerpt: "Pakistan will 'absolutely not' allow the CIA to use bases on its soil for cross-border counterterrorism missions after American forces withdraw from Afghanistan."
akistan will "absolutely not" allow the CIA to use bases on its soil for cross-border counterterrorism missions after American forces withdraw from Afghanistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan tells "Axios on HBO" in a wide-ranging interview airing Sunday at 6pm ET.
Why it matters: The quality of counterterrorism and intelligence capabilities in Afghanistan is a critical question facing the Biden administration as U.S. forces move closer to total withdrawal by Sept. 11.
- The Biden administration also is exploring options in Central Asia to maintain intelligence on terrorist networks inside Afghanistan, but that is complicated for a different reason: Those countries are in Vladimir Putin's sphere of influence.
Where it stands: Despite an uneasy relationship with Pakistan, whose military has deep ties to the Taliban, the U.S. has conducted hundreds of drone strikes and cross-border counterterrorism operations from Pakistani soil.
- But Khan, who was elected in 2018, was unequivocal: Pakistan will not allow the CIA or U.S. special forces to base themselves inside his country ever again, he told Axios.
Between the lines: Khan has long opposed Pakistan cooperating with the U.S. war on terror, but the reality is that he also has no choice but to say this publicly.
- Close observers say it would be political suicide for Khan to embrace the presence of the CIA or special forces on Pakistani soil.
- American officials privately are still hopeful they can come to a covert arrangement with Pakistan's powerful military and intelligence services.
CIA Director William Burns did not meet with Khan when he made an unannounced trip to Islamabad recently to meet with the head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, amid questions about how the CIA will adapt after two decades of intelligence and paramilitary operations in Afghanistan.
- Earlier this month, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the U.S. has had "constructive discussions" with Pakistan about ensuring Afghanistan will never again become a base from which terrorist groups can attack the U.S., but he declined to go into specifics.
What's next: Burns has warned of the "significant risk" of al-Qaeda and ISIS regrouping in Afghanistan. "When the time comes for the U.S. military to withdraw, the U.S. government's ability to collect and act on threats will diminish," he testified in April. "That is simply a fact."
- Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress this week that it will take militant groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS possibly two years to develop the capability to strike the U.S. homeland.
The bottom line: That risk will only increase if the Afghan government collapses and the country falls into a civil war, Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley testified.
- Getting Pakistan on board with the peace process will be the pivotal factor, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said last month in an interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel: "The U.S. now plays only a minor role. The question of peace or hostility is now in Pakistani hands."
Sunday Song: John Lennon & The Plastic Ono Band | Imagine
John Lennon & The Plastic Ono Band, YouTube
Excerpt: "Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion too."
The second album by John Lennon, released in 1971, Imagine and the song it was named for became an instant classic. (photo: Album Imagine )
Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No Hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Livin' for today
Aaa haa
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Livin' life in peace
Yoo hoo
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharin' all the world
Yoo hoo
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
Juliane Diller as a child. (photo: unknown)
Franz Lidz | The Biologist Who Fell to Earth
Franz Lidz
Lidz writes: "On the morning after Juliane Diller fell to Earth, she awoke in the deep jungle of the Peruvian rainforest dazed with incomprehension. Just before noon on the previous day - Christmas Eve, 1971 - the 17-year-old and her mother had boarded a flight in Lima bound for Pucallpa, a rough-and-tumble port city along the Ucayali River."
Her final destination was Panguana, a biological research station in the belly of the Amazon, where for three years she had lived, on and off, with her mother, Maria, and her father, Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, both zoologists.
The flight was supposed to last less than an hour. About 25 minutes after takeoff, the plane, an 86-passenger Lockheed L-188A Electra turboprop, flew into a thunderstorm and began to shake. Overhead storage bins popped open, showering passengers and crew with luggage and Christmas presents.
“My mother, who was sitting beside me, said, ‘Hopefully, this goes all right,” recalled Diller, who spoke by video from her home outside Munich, where she recently retired as deputy director of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology. “Though I could sense her nervousness, I managed to stay calm.”
From a window seat in a back row, she watched a bolt of lightning strike the plane’s right wing. She remembers the aircraft nose-diving and her mother saying, evenly, “Now it’s all over.” She remembers people weeping and screaming. And she remembers the thundering silence that followed. The aircraft had broken apart, separating her from everyone else onboard. “The next thing I knew, I was no longer inside the cabin,” Diller said. “I was outside, in the open air. I hadn’t left the plane; the plane had left me.”
As she plunged, the three-seat bench into which she was belted spun like the winged seed of a maple tree toward the jungle canopy. “From above, the treetops resembled heads of broccoli,” Diller recalled. She then blacked out, only to regain consciousness — alone, under the bench, in a torn minidress — on Christmas morning. She had fallen about 10,000 feet, nearly two miles. Her row of seats is thought to have landed in dense foliage, cushioning the impact. Juliane was the sole survivor of the crash.
Miraculously, her injuries were relatively minor: a broken collarbone, a sprained knee and gashes on her right shoulder and left calf, one eye swollen shut and her field of vision in the other narrowed to a slit. Most unbearable among the discomforts was the disappearance of her eyeglasses — she was nearsighted — and one of her open-back sandals. “I lay there, almost like an embryo for the rest of the day and a whole night, until the next morning,” she wrote in her memoir, “When I Fell From the Sky,” published in Germany in 2011. “I am completely soaked, covered with mud and dirt, for it must have been pouring rain for a day and a night.”
She listened to the calls of birds, the croaks of frogs and the buzzing of insects. “I recognized the sounds of wildlife from Panguana and realized I was in the same jungle and had survived the crash,” she said. “What I experienced was not fear but a boundless feeling of abandonment.” In shock, befogged by a concussion and with only a small bag of candy to sustain her, she soldiered on through the fearsome Amazon: 8-foot speckled caimans, poisonous snakes and spiders, stingless bees that clumped to her face, ever-present swarms of mosquitoes, riverbed stingrays that, when stepped on, instinctively lash out with their barbed, venomous tails.
It was the middle of the wet season, so there was no fruit within reach to pick and no dry kindling with which to make a fire. River water provided what little nourishment the teenager received. For 11 days, despite the staggering humidity and blast-furnace heat, she walked and waded and swam.
A haven for ants and bats
This year is the 50th anniversary of LANSA Flight 508, the deadliest lightning-strike disaster in aviation history. During the intervening years, Juliane moved to Germany, earned a doctorate in biology and became an eminent zoologist. In 1989, she married Erich Diller, an entomologist and an authority on parasitic wasps. Despite an understandable unease about air travel, she has been continually drawn back to Panguana, the remote conservation outpost established by her parents in 1968. “The jungle caught me and saved me,” said Diller, who hasn’t spoken publicly about the accident in many years. “It was not its fault that I landed there.”
In 1981, she spent 18 months in residence at the station while researching her graduate thesis on diurnal butterflies and her doctoral dissertation on bats. Nineteen years later, after the death of her father, Diller took over as director of Panguana and primary organizer of international expeditions to the refuge. “On my lonely 11-day hike back to civilization, I made myself a promise,” Diller said. “I vowed that if I stayed alive, I would devote my life to a meaningful cause that served nature and humanity.”
That cause would become Panguana, the oldest biological research station in Peru. Starting in the 1970s, she and her father lobbied the government to protect the area from clearing, hunting and colonization. Finally, in 2011, the newly minted Ministry of Environment declared Panguana a private conservation area. To help acquire adjacent plots of land, Diller enlisted sponsors from abroad. Largely through the largesse of Hofpfisterei, a bakery chain based in Munich, the property has expanded from its original 445 acres to 4,000.
“Juliane is an outstanding ambassador for how much private philanthropy can achieve,” said Stefan Stolte, an executive board member of Stifterverband, a German nonprofit that promotes education, science and innovation.
Over the past half-century, Panguana has been an engine of scientific discovery. To date, the flora and fauna have provided the fodder for 315 published papers on such exotic topics as the biology of the Neotropical orchid genus Catasetum and the protrusile pheromone glands of the luring mantid.
Cleaved by the Yuyapichis River, the preserve is home to more than 500 species of trees (16 of them palms), 160 types of reptiles and amphibians, 100 different kinds of fish, seven varieties of monkey and 380 bird species. Panguana’s name comes from the local word for the undulated tinamou, a species of ground bird common to the Amazon basin. Diller’s favorite childhood pet was a panguana that she named Polsterchen — or Little Pillow — because of its soft plumage.
“Panguana offers outstanding conditions for biodiversity researchers, serving both as a home base with excellent infrastructure, and as a starting point into the primary rainforest just a few yards away,” said Andreas Segerer, deputy director of the Bavarian State Collection for Zoology in Munich. “Its extraordinary biodiversity is a ‘Garden of Eden’ for scientists, and a source of yielding successful research projects.”
Entomologists have cataloged a teeming array of insects on the ground and in the treetops of Panguana, including butterflies (more than 600 species), orchard bees (26 species) and moths (15,000 species). Manfred Verhaagh of the Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, identified 520 species of ants. (So much for picnics at Panguana.)
While working on her dissertation, Diller documented 52 species of bats at the reserve. “We now know of 56,” she said. “By contrast, there are only 27 species in the entire continent of Europe.” The preserve has been colonized by all three species of vampires. Although they seldom attack humans, one dined on Diller’s big toe. “Vampire bats lap with their tongues, rather than suck,” she said. “After they make a small incision with their teeth, protein in their saliva called Draculin acts as an anticoagulant, which keeps the blood flowing while they feed.”
Return to the crash site
Diller described her youth in Peru with enthusiasm and affection. She was born in Lima, where her parents worked at the national history museum. Earthquakes were common.
“I grew up knowing that nothing is really safe, not even the solid ground I walked on,” Diller said. “The memories have helped me again and again to keep a cool head even in difficult situations.”
Diller said she was still haunted by the midair separation from her mother. Her voice lowered when she recounted certain moments of the experience. “Above all, of course, the moment when I had to accept that really only I had survived and that my mother had indeed died,” she said. “Then there was the moment when I realized that I no longer heard any search planes and was convinced that I would surely die, and the feeling of dying without ever having done anything of significance in my young life.”
She achieved reluctant fame from the air disaster, thanks to a 1974 cheesy Italian biopic, “Miracles Still Happen,” in which she, as a teenager, is portrayed as a hysterical dingbat. She avoided the news media for many years after and is still stung by the early reportage, which was sometimes wildly inaccurate. According to an account in Life magazine in 1972, she made her getaway by building a raft of vines and branches. The German weekly Stern had her feasting on a cake she found in the wreckage and implied, from an interview conducted during her recovery, that she was arrogant and unfeeling.
Diller lay low until 1998, when she was approached by movie director Werner Herzog, who hoped to turn her survivor’s story into a documentary for German TV. He had narrowly missed taking the same Christmas Eve flight while scouting locations for his historical drama “Aguirre, the Wrath of God.” He told her, “For all I know, we may have bumped elbows in the airport.”
Intrigued, Diller traveled to Peru and was flown by helicopter to the crash site, where she recounted the harrowing details to Herzog amid the plane’s still scattered remains. The most gruesome moment in the film was her recollection of the fourth day in the jungle, when she came upon a row of seats. Still strapped in were a woman and two men who had landed headfirst, with such force that they were buried 3 feet into the ground, legs jutting grotesquely upward.
“It was horrifying,” she told me. “I didn’t want to touch them, but I wanted to make sure that the woman wasn’t my mother. I grabbed a stick and turned one of her feet carefully so I could see the toenails. They were polished, and I took a deep breath. My mother never used polish on her nails.”
The result of Diller’s collaboration with Herzog was “Wings of Hope,” an unsettling film that, filtered through Herzog’s gruff humanism, demonstrated the strange and terrible beauty of nature. “Making the documentary was therapeutic,” Diller said. “At the time of the crash, no one offered me any formal counseling or psychological help. I had no idea that it was possible to even get help.”
Lima or bust
Diller attributes her tenacity to her father, Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, a single-minded ecologist. He met his wife, Maria von Mikulicz-Radecki, in 1947 at the University of Kiel, where both were biology students. (Her doctoral thesis dealt with the coloration of wild and domestic doves; his dealt with woodlice). Late in 1948, Koepcke was offered a job at the natural history museum in Lima.
Getting there was not easy. Postwar travel in Europe was difficult enough, but particularly problematic for Germans. There were no passports, and visas were hard to come by.
To reach Peru, Koepcke had to first get to a port and inveigle his way onto a trans-Atlantic freighter. Setting off on foot, he trekked over several mountain ranges, was arrested and served time in an Italian prison camp, and finally stowed away in the hold of a cargo ship bound for Uruguay by burrowing into a pile of rock salt. When he showed up at the office of the museum director, two years after accepting the job offer, he was told the position had already been filled.
He persevered, and wound up managing the museum’s ichthyology collection. His fiancee followed him in a South Pacific steamer in 1950 and was hired at the museum, too, eventually running the ornithology department. An expert on neotropical birds, she has since been memorialized in the scientific names of four Peruvian species.
He is remembered for a 1,684-page, two-volume opus, “Life Forms: The Basis for a Universally Valid Biological Theory.” In 1956, a species of lava lizard endemic to Peru, Microlophus koepckeorum, was named in honor of the couple.
In 1968, the Koepckes moved from Lima to an abandoned patch of primary forest in the middle of the jungle. Their plan was to conduct field studies on its plants and animals for five years, exploring the rainforest without exploiting it. “I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the prospect of being there,” Diller said. “I was 14, and I didn’t want to leave my schoolmates to sit in what I imagined would be the gloom under tall trees, whose canopy of leaves didn’t permit even a glimmer of sunlight.”
To Juliane’s surprise, her new home wasn’t dreary at all. “It was gorgeous, an idyll on the river with trees that bloomed blazing red,” she recalled in her memoir. “There were mango, guava and citrus fruits, and over everything a glorious 150-foot-tall lupuna tree, also known as a kapok.”
The family lived in Panguana full-time with a German shepherd, Lobo, and a parakeet, Florian, in a wooden hut propped on stilts, with a roof of palm thatch. Juliane was home-schooled for two years, receiving her textbooks and homework by mail, until the educational authorities demanded that she return to Lima to finish high school.
‘A place of peace and harmony’
Diller’s parents instilled in their only child not only a love of the Amazon wilderness, but the knowledge of the inner workings of its volatile ecosystem. If you ever get lost in the rainforest, they counseled, find moving water and follow its course to a river, where human settlements are likely to be.
Their advice proved prescient. In 1971, Juliane, hiking away from the crash site, came upon a creek, which became a stream, which eventually became a river. On Day 11 of her ordeal, she stumbled into the camp of a group of forest workers. They fed her cassava and poured gasoline into her open wounds to flush out the maggots that protruded “like asparagus tips,” she said. The next morning the workers took her to a village, from which she was flown to safety.
“For my parents, the rainforest station was a sanctuary, a place of peace and harmony, isolated and sublimely beautiful,” Diller said. “I feel the same way. The jungle was my real teacher. I learned to use old Indian trails as shortcuts and lay out a system of paths with a compass and folding ruler to orient myself in the thick bush. The jungle is as much a part of me as my love for my husband, the music of the people who live along the Amazon and its tributaries, and the scars that remain from the plane crash.”
Before 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic restricted international air travel, Diller made a point of visiting the nature preserve twice a year on monthlong expeditions. Much of her administrative work involves keeping industrial and agricultural development at bay.
She estimates that as much as 17% of Amazonia has been deforested, and she laments that vanishing ice, fluctuating rain patterns and global warming — the average temperature at Panguana has risen by 4 degrees Celsius in the past 30 years — are causing its wetlands to shrink. A recent study published in the journal Science Advances warned that the rainforest may be nearing a dangerous tipping point.
“After 20%, there is no possibility of recovery,” Diller said, grimly. “You could expect a major forest dieback and a rather sudden evolution to something else, probably a degraded savanna. That would lead to a dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions, which is why the preservation of the Peruvian rainforest is so urgent and necessary.”
Under Diller’s stewardship, Panguana has increased its outreach to neighboring Indigenous communities by providing jobs, bankrolling a new schoolhouse and raising awareness about the short- and long-term effects of human activity on the rainforest’s biodiversity and climate change.
“The key is getting the surrounding population to commit to preserving and protecting its environment,” she said. “Species and climate protection will only work if the locals are integrated into the projects, have a benefit for their already modest living conditions and the cooperation is transparent.”
She plans to go back, and continue returning, once air travel allows.
Fifty years after Diller’s traumatic journey through the jungle, she is pleased to look back on her life and know that it has achieved purpose and meaning. “Just to have helped people and to have done something for nature means it was good that I was allowed to survive,” she said with a flicker of a smile. “And for that I am so grateful.”
