Charlie Munger: We are never going back to a five-day work week in the office

Alexandra Semenova
·Reporter
Wed, February 16, 2022,

Will we ever return to a five-day in-office work week? Charlie Munger doesn’t think so.

Even as COVD-19 restrictions ease across the U.S. and employers call on workers to resume in-person workdays, the famed investor said Wednesday during The Daily Journal’s annual shareholders meeting that he does not expect white-collar employees will ever return to in-person work full-time again.

“It’s amazing the percentage of people in computer science that don’t want to be in the office for a normal life,” Munger said. “They want to do a lot of it from locations that are more convenient for them — I think that’s going to remain forever.”

His view comes amid a broad push by leaders in corporate America to get staff back to the physical workplace as states increasingly drop mask mandates and lift pandemic-related restrictions. Most recently, Microsoft told U.S. employees to begin returning to their offices starting Feb. 28 in an attempt to resume normal operations as virus case numbers recede.

Corporate employers have played back-and-forth for months on office policies amid changing guidelines from local government leaders and the ebbs and flows in coronavirus case counts across the country, with the Delta and Omicron variants disrupting plans for broader returns this past year.

As the latest Omicron-driven wave appears to abate, on Wall Street, office attendance at financial giants including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America have risen in recent weeks, while American Express said earlier this month it would ask New York employees to work from their offices at least once a week starting in March, embracing a hybrid model.

The J.P. Morgan logo sign on the entrance of a glass office building in Midtown Manhattan, New York, USA on 23 January 2020. JPMorgan Chase & Co. is an American multinational investment bank and financial services holding company has the headquarters in New York City. NY, USA

 (Photo by Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

But many employees who have become accustomed to working remotely over the past two years have resisted calls for full-time onsite returns, especially as some companies continue to embrace at-home work and experiment with hybrid schedules.

A recent survey conducted by the Advanced Workplace Associates, global management consulting firm, of nearly 10,000 people working in the finance, technology and energy sectors around the world found that only 3% of white-collar employees are willing to return to full-time office hours.

In the U.S., 84% of survey participants said they want to work from home two or more days a week.

“Employers have to realize that the genie is out of the bottle,” AWA managing director Andrew Mawson said in a statement. “Workers have seen that flexibility can work and bosses who are not sensitive to their employees’ needs will suffer accordingly.”

At The Daily Journal meeting, Munger also suggested that a full recovery in business travel was unlikely.

“I don’t think the average corporation is going to fly its directors around so they can sit at the same table for every meeting of the year,” Munger said.

“The Berkshire Hathaway directors have met face-to-face twice a year and done everything else on the telephone or with consent minutes, and it’s worked fine,” he added. “I don’t think we needed all these goddamn meetings and airplane flights.”

While Munger argued that completing business activities remotely has made certain components of work “simpler, cheaper, and more efficient,” he argued, on the other hand, that federal stimulus for workers sidelined during the pandemic has been too liberal.

“What makes capitalism work is the fact that if you’re an able-bodied young person, if you refuse to work, you suffer a fair amount of agony, and because of that agony, the whole economic system works,” he said, adding effective, prospering economies have traditionally imposed hardship on young people who don’t want to work.

“You take away that hardship and say ‘you can stay home and get more than if you come in to work,’ that’s quite disruptive to an economic system like ours,” Munger added. “The next time we do this, I don’t think we ought to be so liberal.”

Facing Texas pushback, BlackRock says it backs fossil fuels

Ross Kerber
Thu, February 17, 2022, 


Lease Operator Jeremy Jay walks through an oil production facility owned by Parsley Energy in the Permian Basin near Midland

BOSTON (Reuters) - At the risk of being dropped from Texas pension funds, BlackRock Inc has ramped up its message that the world's largest asset manager is a friend of the oil and gas industries.

As a large and long-term investor in fossil fuel companies, "we want to see these companies succeed and prosper," BlackRock executives wrote in a letter that a spokesman confirmed was sent at the start of the year to officials, trade groups and others in energy-rich Texas.


"We will continue to invest in and support fossil fuel companies, including Texas fossil fuel companies," states the memo, signed by Dalia Blass, BlackRock's head of external affairs, and copied to Mark McCombe, BlackRock's chief client officer.

Although the message is consistent with its other statements, the emphasis is new after years in which BlackRock has stressed its efforts to take climate change and other environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues into account in its investment and proxy voting decisions.

BlackRock faces a balancing act as some pension funds and endowments move to divest from fossil fuel stocks over climate-change concerns, and because of its size. Like rivals, BlackRock has declined to follow suit.

The U.S. securities regulator is developing a new rule on corporate climate-change disclosures.

In Texas, new legislation requires the state's comptroller, Glenn Hegar, to draw up a list of financial companies that boycott fossil fuels. Those firms could then be barred from state pension funds like the $197 billion Teacher Retirement System of Texas, which has about $2.5 billion with BlackRock.

A spokesman for Hegar, a Republican, said via email his agency is "currently working to establish suitable candidates for the divestment list."

BlackRock in its letter wrote that "we have not and will not boycott energy companies," and cited holdings in Texas-based companies like Exxon Mobil Corp, ConocoPhillips and Kinder Morgan Inc.

Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, a Republican, has called on Hegar to put BlackRock first on the list, citing among other things BlackRock's statements in support of "net zero" targets for companies to reduce emissions. That amounts to a boycott under the new Texas law, Patrick wrote in a Jan. 19 letter, by invoking environmental standards beyond federal and state laws.

Many other top asset managers including Vanguard Group and State Street Corp have embraced similar efforts such as signing on to the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative.

Patrick's office did not respond to questions.

BlackRock's letter was first made public online on Twitter by Alex Epstein, author of a book backing the use of fossil fuels.

(The story corrects third paragraph to show letter was copied to McCombe, not signed by McCombe.)

(Reporting by Ross Kerber; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

'Morally Obscene': Sanders Blasts GOP, Manchin Over 41% Spike in Child Poverty

"How did this happen? Fifty Republicans and one corporate Democrat allowed the $300-a-month Child Tax Credit to expire," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Children and teachers complete a mural in celebration of the launch 

of the expanded child tax credit on July 14, 2021 in Washington, D.C. 

(Photo: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Community Change)

JAKE JOHNSON

February 18, 2022

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday castigated the GOP and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin for killing the boosted Child Tax Credit after new research showed that child poverty spiked by 41% in January—the first month since July 2021 that eligible families didn't receive the popular benefit.

"In January, the child poverty rate increased by 40% in just one month—jumping from 12.1% to 17% as 3.7 million children slipped into poverty," Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a Twitter post. "How did this happen? Fifty Republicans and one corporate Democrat allowed the $300-a-month Child Tax Credit to expire. That is morally obscene."

The new figures come from a study released Thursday by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, which found that the December lapse of the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) helped push child poverty to "the highest rate since the end of 2020."

"On its own, the monthly Child Tax Credit kept three million children from poverty in July; by December, it was keeping 3.7 million children from poverty and reducing monthly child poverty by 30%," the center noted in a policy brief. "A roundup of the available research reveals that the monthly Child Tax Credit payments buffered family finances amidst the continuing pandemic, increased families’ abilities to meet their basic needs, reduced child poverty and food insufficiency, and had no discernable negative effects on parental employment."



The study was published as Democratic lawmakers' efforts to extend the boosted CTC remained stalled due to the continued opposition of every Senate Republican and Manchin (D-W.Va.), who has reportedly told colleagues in private that he believes some parents used the monthly benefit payments to buy drugs.

"One U.S. senator 'heard stories' about people allegedly using the Child Tax Credit 'for drugs' without any evidence or data to back it up," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted Thursday. "He then used that as justification to nuke the entire national program, causing millions of kids to fall into poverty in weeks. Horrifying."

"Meanwhile," she added, "the press talks about it like it’s some beltway drama without ever showing the people who are sleeping in bubble jackets with no heat or the kids going hungry waiting for some guy in a yacht to decide if they are fully human or not. It’s just shameful, all of it."

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a lead sponsor of ambitious new legislation that would cut child poverty by an estimated two-thirds, said Thursday that "it is beyond revolting how little attention is given to the fact that the wealthiest nation in the history of the world can afford endless wars and trillions in tax cuts to the 1%, but cannot feed, house, or care for its own children."

Related Content

'Manchin Has Probably Doomed the Party': Support for Dems Dips After Child Tax Credit Killed

With the entirety of its Build Back Better agenda—including a proposed CTC extension—stuck in the Senate, the Biden White House has shifted its focus in recent days to urging recipients of the credit to file their tax returns, which will allow them to get the other half of the benefit.

The first half of the CTC payments—$300 per child under the age of six and $250 per child between the ages of six and 17—were delivered on a monthly basis in 2021.

"If you are one of the more than 30 million families who have already received the Child Tax Credit, you still need to file your taxes," Vice President Kamala Harris said during an event earlier this month. "That is the only way to receive the second half of what you are owed. So, remember: You are owed more, but you still need to file your taxes."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

 The Emergencies Act and double standards

"Freedom Convoy" protesters and Ottawa Police face off in a confrontation on Friday. Credit: Ottawa Police RABBLE.CA The top story this week was of course Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s invoking of the federal Emergencies Act on Monday February 14. As we produce this newsletter, after weeks of inaction as described by Karl Nerenberg and Robin Browne, police forces have begun to end the occupation in Ottawa. As we continue to monitor events in Ottawa closely, the question everyone is asking - particularly residents who find themselves confined to “red zones” with limited movement - is how has this been permitted to go on for as long as it has? Writers on rabble.ca argue, because that’s what the police do: uphold white supremacy in Canada.  Monia Mazigh writes that "If there is a lesson to be drawn from the ongoing occupation of Ottawa’s downtown, it is that anti-terrorism legislation is unconstitutional and ultimately, useless in protecting public safety. It is time to repeal these laws and hold a public debate about the meaning of freedom. Instead of laws that curtail our civil liberties, we should reflect on the importance of respecting our human rights to ensure both our safety and our security." Rachel Snow agrees that the Ottawa convoy exposes the racism that First Nations have long known. When the truckers and supporters first descended on Ottawa in January, there was “practically a red-carpet welcome” from the police forces, writes Snow. Live footage posted on social media sites point to joviality between the police and protestors.  When the issue of all-night honking went to court, the judge was slow to grant an injunction at first. He maintained he could not issue anything because there was no surety in exactly “who was making the noise – the trucks or their supporters” so the honking noise was “indistinguishable.”  This sort of slow-moving justice has never been granted for Indigenous peoples. “What happens to First Nation people standing against injustice? They are beaten, cuffed and thrown into jail,” she writes. “This is your Canada. There is a rule of law for the First Nations and a rule of law that applies to non-First Nation people.”  Robin Browne observes that, “the Ottawa Police Service, like all police forces in Canada, has always had one mandate: protect the powerful – or at least don’t get in their way. And the thousands of convoy protesters, with their millions in the bank, are the powerful.” Become a monthly sustainer

In some cities, residents have taken it upon themselves to stop the convoys. Archana Rampure reports from the frontlines in Ottawa this week as 4,000 people marched in support of vaccines, mask mandates, and democracy. “We take care of ourselves. We have been abandoned by the police,” she writes. “What does it say about the state of affairs in the nation’s capital when ordinary people step up to what the police won’t?”  Meanwhile in Edmonton, a small group of counter-demonstrators managed to blockade a parade of “Freedom Convoy” supporters on their way to the city’s downtown last Saturday. The blockade had managed to stop a line of pickup trucks, SUVs and four semi-trailers cabs in the eastbound lane of River Valley. Wildly, police told the counter-demonstrators to remove themselves from the area and threatened them with application of Alberta’s Critical Infrastructure Defence Act.

AOC Hasn't Given Up on Her Vision for Social Change

After three years in the halls of power, she’s seen the “shit show” up close—and hasn’t given up on her vision for how to change it.

February 17, 2022 David Remnick 

THE NEW YORKER

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat representing parts of Queens and the Bronx (including Rikers Island), quickly became the most prominent progressive voice in the House of Representatives after she defeated a twenty-year incumbent, Joe Crowley, and went to Capitol Hill in January, 2019. In Congress, she is hardly alone in her advocacy for issues ranging from Medicare for All to the Green New Deal; she belongs to the Bernie Sanders wing of the Party. But few in the history of the institution have so quickly become a focus of attention, admiration, and derision.

Elected when she was twenty-nine, the youngest woman ever to serve in the House, Ocasio-Cortez has proved herself an effective examiner in committee hearings and a master of social media. In other words, she offers both substance and flair, and this combination seems to drive her critics to the point of frenzied distraction. Fox News, the Post, and the Daily Mail, along with a collection of right-wing Republican foes in Congress, obsess over her left-wing politics and her celebrity. In November, Paul Gosar, a Republican representative from Arizona who has spoken up for white-nationalist leaders and voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to police officers who defended the Capitol on January 6, 2021, posted an anime sequence that depicted him killing Ocasio-Cortez with a sword. More recently, a former Trump campaign adviser, Steve Cortes, went online to mock Ocasio-Cortez’s boyfriend, Riley Roberts, for his sandalled feet, prompting her to fire back, “If Republicans are mad they can’t date me they can just say that instead of projecting their frustrations onto my boyfriend’s feet. Ya creepy weirdos.”

When we spoke earlier this month, by Zoom, Ocasio-Cortez talked at length not only about the impasse the Democrats now face but also the general atmosphere of working in Congress. “Honestly, it is a shit show,” she said. “It’s scandalizing, every single day. What is surprising to me is how it never stops being scandalizing.”

The interview, which was prepared with assistance from Mengfei Chen and Steven Valentino, took place on February 1st, and has been edited for length and clarity.

Much of the Biden Administration’s agenda in Congress has pretty much stalled. A term that began with lofty F.D.R.-like ambitions is now at a standstill. How would you rate the President’s performance after a year?

There are some things that are outside of the President’s control, and there’s very little one can say about that, with Joe Manchin and [Kyrsten] Sinema. But I think there are some things within the President’s control, and his hesitancy around them has contributed to a situation that isn’t as optimal.

My concern is that we’re getting into analysis paralysis, and we don’t have much time. We should really not take this present political moment for granted, and do everything that we can. At the beginning of last year, many of us in the progressive wing—but not just the progressive wing—were saying we don’t want to repeat a lot of the hand-wringing that happened in 2010, when there was this very precious opportunity in the Senate for things to happen.

People in the Biden White House would argue that the margins are the margins and Manchin’s politics are what they are. He comes from a state that is dominated by a much more conservative vote. And Sinema is . . . unpredictable. They would argue that they made concession after concession and still got nowhere.

The Presidency is so much larger than just the votes in the legislature. This is something that we saw with President Obama. I think we’re seeing this dynamic perhaps extend a little bit into the Biden Administration, with a reluctance to use executive power. The President has not been using his executive power to the extent that some would say is necessary.

Where would you move first?

One of the single most impactful things President Biden can do is pursue student-loan cancellation. It’s entirely within his power. This really isn’t a conversation about providing relief to a small, niche group of people. It’s very much a keystone action politically. I think it’s a keystone action economically as well. And I can’t underscore how much the hesitancy of the Biden Administration to pursue student-loan cancellation has demoralized a very critical voting block that the President, the House, and the Senate need in order to have any chance at preserving any of our majority.

What is in the realm of the achievable, the realm of the possible, between now and the election?

That’s why I kind of started off by talking about the executive powers of the President, because I don’t think that there’s any guarantee of getting something through that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will approve of that will significantly and materially improve the lives of working people. It’s a bit of a dismal assessment, but I think that, given an analysis of their past behavior, it is a fair one. The President has a responsibility to look at the tools that he has.

You had some political experience before you were elected, but it was from some distance. You weren’t a member of Congress. You weren’t “in the room.” What do you see in the room? What is it like, day to day, being a member of this institution, which, I have to say, from outside, looks like a shit show?

Honestly, it is a shit show. It’s scandalizing, every single day. What is surprising to me is how it never stops being scandalizing. Some folks perhaps get used to it, or desensitized to the many different things that may be broken, but there is so much reliance on this idea that there are adults in the room, and, in some respect, there are. But sometimes to be in a room with some of the most powerful people in the country and see the ways that they make decisions—sometimes they’re just susceptible to groupthink, susceptible to self-delusion.

Sketch it out for us. What does it look like?

The infrastructure plan, if it does what it’s intended to do, politicians will take credit for it ten years from now, if we even have a democracy ten years from now. But the Build Back Better Act is the vast majority of Biden’s agenda. The infrastructure plan, as important as it is, is much smaller. So we were talking about pairing these two things together. The Progressive Caucus puts up a fight, and then somewhere around October there comes a critical juncture. The President is then under enormous pressure from the media. There’s this idea that the President can’t “get things done,” and that his Presidency is at risk. It’s what I find to be just a lot of sensationalism. However, the ramifications of that were being very deeply felt. And you have people running tough races, and it’s “he needs a win.” And so I’m sitting there in a group with some of the most powerful people in the country talking about how, if we pass the infrastructure bill right now, then this will be what the President can campaign on. The American people will give him credit for it. He can win his Presidency on it. If we don’t pass it now, then we’ve risked democracy itself.

Who’s in the room? You say the most powerful people.

You’re talking about everybody from leadership to folks who are in tough seats, but all elected officials in the Democratic Party on the federal level. And people really just talk themselves into thinking that passing the infrastructure plan on that day, in that week, is the most singular important decision of the Presidency, more than voting rights, more than the Build Back Better Act itself, which contains the vast majority of the President’s actual plan. You’re kind of sitting there in the room and watching people work themselves up into a decision. It’s a fascinating psychological moment that you’re watching unfold.

It’s not to say that all these things that they’re saying are a hundred-per-cent false. But I come from a community that is often discounted in many different ways, because, you know, these are “reliable Democrats.” Like, what she has to say doesn’t matter, etc. What does she know about this political moment? The thing that’s unfortunate, and what a lot of people have yet to recognize, is that the motivations and the sense of investment and faith in our democracy and governance from people in communities like mine also determine majorities. They also determine the outcomes of statewide races and Presidential races. And, when you have a gerrymandered House, when you have the Senate constructed the way that it is, when you have a Presidency that relies on the Electoral College in the fashion that it does, you’re in this room and you see that all of these people who are elected are truly representative of our current political system. And our current political system is designed to revolve around a very narrow band of people who are, over all, materially O.K. It does not revolve around the majority.

You’ve used a phrase “if we have a democracy ten years from now.” Do you think we won’t?

I think there’s a very real risk that we will not. What we risk is having a government that perhaps postures as a democracy, and may try to pretend that it is, but isn’t.

What’s going to bring us to that point? You hear talk now about our being on the brink of civil war—that’s the latest phrase in a series of books that have come out. What will happen to bring us to that degraded point?

Well, I think it has started, but it’s not beyond hope. We’re never beyond hope. But we’ve already seen the opening salvos of this, where you have a very targeted, specific attack on the right to vote across the United States, particularly in areas where Republican power is threatened by changing electorates and demographics. You have white-nationalist, reactionary politics starting to grow into a critical mass. What we have is the continued sophisticated takeover of our democratic systems in order to turn them into undemocratic systems, all in order to overturn results that a party in power may not like.

The concern is that we will look like what other nation?

I think we will look like ourselves. I think we will return to Jim Crow. I think that’s what we risk.

What’s the scenario for that?

You have it already happening in Texas, where Jim Crow-style disenfranchisement laws have already been proposed. You had members of the state legislature, just a few months ago, flee the state in order to prevent such voting laws from being passed. In Florida, where you had the entire state vote to allow people who were released from prison to be reënfranchised after they have served their debt to society, that’s essentially being replaced with poll taxes and intimidation at the polls. You have the complete erasure and attack on our own understanding of history, to replace teaching history with institutionalized propaganda from white-nationalist perspectives in our schools. This is what the scaffolding of Jim Crow was.

So there are many impulses to compare this to somewhere else. There are certainly plenty of comparisons to make—with the rise of fascism in post-World War One Germany. But you really don’t have to look much further than our own history, because what we have, I think, is a uniquely complex path that we have walked. And the question that we’re really facing is: Was the last fifty to sixty years after the Civil Rights Act just a mere flirtation that the United States had with a multiracial democracy that we will then decide was inconvenient for those in power? And we will revert to what we had before, which, by the way, wasn’t just Jim Crow but also the extraordinary economic oppression as well?

Do you think many Republicans share your concern about the fate of democracy? Do you have those kinds of conversations?

It’s a complex question because there’s so many different kinds of Republicans. But I’m reluctant to get into the navel-gazing of it, because, at the end of the day, they all make the same decisions. You might be able to appeal to the good natures or even a sense of charity of a handful, but ultimately we have what we have. At the end of the day, you know, who cares if they’re true believers or if they’re just complicit? They’re still voting to overturn the results of our election.

We’re constantly told, if you could only hear what’s being said in the cloakrooms, a lot of Republicans find Donald Trump repulsive but know that they’re going to lose their seats if they say so. Is being in Congress such a great job that you will trade your principles and soul for that job?

What I think some Republicans struggle with, the very few that are in that position, is a concern that they will be replaced by someone even worse. You know, O.K., externally I might look like a good soldier, I might look like I’m falling in line, but, if I lose my primary and I get replaced with ten more Marjorie Taylor Greenes, we’ll be in an even worse situation.

That’s perhaps where they may be coming from. And, to a certain extent, you do have these critical moments. You have January 6th, and, if Mike Pence had made a different split-second decision that day and done what President Trump was asking of him, we would be in a very different place right now.

When you are asked questions about whether or not Nancy Pelosi should stay as Speaker, when you’re asked questions about the rather advanced ages of Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, and Chuck Schumer, does it make a difference? You’re saying it’s structural. It’s not generational.

It’s both. The reason we have this generational situation that we do is also, in part, due to our structures. The generational aspect of things is absolutely pertinent to the kind of decision-making. There is this world view, this appeal, of a time passed that I think sometimes guides decision-making. President Biden thought that he could talk with Manchin like an old pal and bring him along. And, frankly, that was what the White House’s strategy was, in terms of what they communicated to us. That’s how they tried to sell passage of not even half a loaf but a tenth of the loaf. It was “We promise we’ll be able to bring them along.” There is this idea that this is just a temporary thing and we’ll get back to that. But I grew up my entire life in this mess. There’s no nostalgia for a time when Washington worked in my life.

Is it healthy or not for the Democratic Party for Nancy Pelosi to remain in place as the Speaker, as leader of the Democratic caucus in the House?

It’s really all about a specific moment that we’re in. We are in such a delicate moment of the day-to-day, particularly with the threats to our democracy. I believe that, at the end of the day, there’s going to be a generational change in our leadership. That is just a simple fact. Now, when that particular moment happens? I think it’s a larger question of conditions and circumstance.

You don’t want to go near this one.

It’s a tough question. It’s not even just a question of the Speaker. It’s a question of our caucus. I wish the Democratic Party had more stones. I wish our party was capable of truly supporting bold leadership that can address root causes.

Is it that the representatives don’t have the stones, or do you want a different public opinion, as it were? In other words, for example, take “defund the police” as a policy demand. Certainly, in New York City, no one is talking about that now. As a matter of protest? Yes. As activism? Yes. But we have a new mayor, Eric Adams, who is anything but “defund the police.” Who are you disappointed in?

I still am disappointed in leadership and in my colleagues, because, ultimately, these conversations about “defund,” or this, that, and the other, are what is happening in public and popular conversations. Our job is to be able to engage in that conversation, to read what is happening, and to be able to develop a vision and translate it into a course of action. All too often, I believe that a lot of our decisions are reactive to public discourse instead of responsive to public discourse. And so, just because there was this large conversation about “defund the police” coming from the streets, the response was to immediately respond to it with fear, with pooh-poohing, with “this isn’t us,” with arm’s distance. So, then, what is the vision? That’s where I think the Party struggles.

Aren’t you seeing the response in City Hall now in the shape of Eric Adams?

Well, I think you also see it in the shape of the City Council that was elected. You have a record number of progressives. People often bring up the Mayor as evidence of some sort of decision around policing. I disagree with that assessment. I represent a community that is very victimized by a rise in violence. (And I represent Rikers Island!) What oftentimes people overlook is that the same communities that supported Mayor Adams also elected Tiffany Cabán. What the public wants is a strong sense of direction. I don’t think that in electing Mayor Adams everyone in the city supports bringing back torture to Rikers Island in the form of solitary confinement. What people want is a strong vision about how we establish public safety in our communities.

One of the ways that we engage is by backing some of the only policies that are actually supported by evidence to reduce incidents of violent crime: violence-interruption programs, summer youth employment. When we talk about the surge of violence happening right now, when I engage with our hospitals, doctors, social workers, everyone’s telling me that there’s so many things we’re not discussing. The surge in violence is being driven by young people, particularly young men. And we allow the discourse to make it sound as though it’s, like, these shady figures in the bush, jumping out from a corner. These are young men. These are boys. We’re also not discussing the mental-health crisis that we are experiencing as a country as a result of the pandemic.

Because we run away from substantive discussions about this, we don’t want to say some of the things that are obvious, like, Gee, the child-tax credit just ran out, on December 31st, and now people are stealing baby formula. We don’t want to have that discussion. We want to say these people are criminals or we want to talk about “people who are violent,” instead of “environments of violence,” and what we’re doing to either contribute to that or dismantle that.

I’ve never seen anybody so quickly become a lightning rod for right-wing criticism and obsession. Why do you think there’s such a fixation on you personally?

I think there’s just some surface-level stuff. And, to be honest, it’s not just the right wing. I was laughing because a couple of months ago someone showed me some of the news footage and coverage from the night that I was elected. And, obviously, I didn’t see any of it because I was, like, losing my mind.

But there was this footage, I think it was Brian Williams. And it was, like, breaking news: the third-most-powerful Democrat in the House of Representatives seems to have been unseated by this radical socialist. All the buzzwords that the right wing uses now were also completely legitimized by mainstream media on the night of the election. I never had a chance. People act as though there was something I could have done. There really wasn’t. It was kind of baked in from the beginning, and my choice was how to respond to that.

And I think because I respond to it differently, that increases a certain level of novelty, which then increases interest. But then there’s also just the basic stuff. I’m young, I’m a woman, I’m a woman of color. I’m not liberal in a traditional sense. I’m willing to buck against my own party, and in a real way. And I’m everything that they need. I’m the red meat for their base.

Do you worry sometimes that you take the bait too much or poke the bear in a way that might not be, in retrospect, something you should’ve done? Like, for example, the Met Gala, the “Tax the Rich” dress, or your response to the really weird tweet about your boyfriend’s feet?

All the time. Every day you make decisions, and you have to make decisions about whether it’s a good idea to go after this or if it’s a bad idea to go after it. Sometimes you make good decisions. Sometimes you make less-than-optimal ones. And then you reflect on them and you try to kind of sharpen your steel.

What were the less-than-optimal ones?

Everything has a different goal, right? And so, if you’re at home on Twitter, or if you’re at home on TV, there are some things that are not for you. There are some things I do that you don’t like that are not intended for you to like, such as what happened with the Met Gala. There are a lot of folks who did not like that. There were some “principled leftists” who didn’t like that. But, when you look at my community, it’s not a college town, a socialist, leftist, academic community. It’s a working-class community that I’m able to engage in a collective conversation about our principles. And, honestly, there’s a response to that in some circles online that may be negative, but in my community the response was quite positive.

The response to the Met Gala was positive in your community? How did you feel it?

Yeah. Because sometimes you just need to give a little Bronx jeer to the rich and to the spectacle. You need to puncture the façade. My community and my family—we’re postal workers, my uncle is a maintenance man, my mom’s a domestic worker. Sometimes you just need to have that moment.

It is a bizarre psychological experience to live specifically now in 2022. We’re not even talking about a culture of celebrity. We’re talking about a culture of commodification of human beings, from the bottom all the way to the top. And there’s absolutely a bizarre psychological experience of this that also plays into these decisions. For example, like what happened in responding to these bizarre things, like about my boyfriend’s feet. I’ve felt for a long time that we need to talk about the bizarre psychological impulses underpinning the right wing.

It’s not “politically correct” to be able to talk about these things, but they are so clearly having an obvious impact on not just our public discourse but the concentration of power. We have to talk about patriarchy, racism, capitalism, but you’re not going to have those conversations by using those words. You have to have those conversations by really responding in uplifting moments. I don’t really care if other people understand it. Sometimes what seems to some folks a moment that’s gauche or something, I often do it with the intention of exposing cultural or psychological undercurrents that people don’t want to talk about. Which, by the way, is why I think sometimes people read these moments as gauche or low-class or whatever they may be. And sometimes how I feel is, if I’m just going to be this, like, commodified avatar thing, then I’m going to play with it, like a toy.

It’s a rough thing to deal with.

Yeah. It’s awful.

One of the cudgels used by the right these days, and not only the right, is fear about cancellation and “wokeness.” We’ve even heard members of the House give speeches about the dangers of so-called cancel culture. And, at the same time, it does seem like norms around speech are changing around fears of online backlashes. I know you’ve criticized that term, “cancel culture,” even dismissed it, but you did so in a tweet.

You look at the capture of power in the right wing, the ascent of white nationalism, the concentration of wealth. You cannot really animate or concentrate a movement like that—you can’t coalesce it into functional political power—without a sense of persecution or victimhood. And that’s the role of this concept of cancel culture. It’s the speck of dust around which the raindrop must form in order to precipitate takeovers of school boards, pushing actual discourse out of the acceptable norms, like in terms of the 1619 Project or getting books banned from schools. They need the concept of cancel culture, of persecution, in order to justify, animate, and pursue a political program of takeover, or at least a constant further concentration of their own power.

You talk about cancel culture. But notice that those discussions only go one way. We don’t talk about all the people who were fired. You just kind of talk about, like, right-leaning podcast bros and more conservative figures. But, for example, Marc Lamont Hill was fired [from CNN] for discussing an issue with respect to Palestinians, pretty summarily. There was no discussion about it, no engagement, no thoughtful discourse over it, just pure accusation.

Last month, an ex-staffer of New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s told the New York Post that you could mount “a very, very credible challenge and quite likely beat her.” How do you feel about that? How do you view your political future?

I’m not trying to be, like, “I’m not like the other girls.” I’m not trying to position myself in that way. But I don’t think that I make these kinds of decisions as if I’m operating with some sort of ten-to-fifteen-year plan, like a lot of people do. Half this town, if not more, has been to a fancy Ivy League school. And so, as a consequence, everyone is, like, what chess pieces are being put down for what specific aspiration? I make decisions based on where I think people are and what we’re ready for, particularly as a movement. I think a lot of people sometimes make these decisions based on what they want, right? What I want is a lot more decentralized. I think it’s a lot more rooted in mass movements.

Could you see yourself walking away from public office entirely and going to a life of mass movements?

I think about it all the time. When I entertain possibilities for my future, it’s like anybody else. I could be doing what I’m doing in a little bit of a different form, but I could also not be in elected office as well. It could come in so many different forms. I wake up, and I’m, like, what would be the most effective thing to do to advance the power and build the power of working people?

Well, do you wake up sometimes in your Capitol Hill apartment and say, What the hell am I doing here? I’m one representative out of hundreds. I’m in a gridlocked situation. I’m not effecting the change I want to, and I’d rather join, or lead, or help lead a movement outside of government?

I’ve had those thoughts, absolutely. We all have different options in front of us. And the choice of what option we take at any given point is a reflection of all of those conditions, our motivations, all of those things. And there are times when I’m cynical and I sometimes fall into that. I’m just, like, “Man, maybe I should just, like, learn to grow my own food and teach other people how to do that!”

But I also reject the total cynicism that what’s happening here is fruitless. I’ve been in this cycle before in my life, before I even ran for office, before it was even a thought.

The social-media folks at The New Yorker invited people to propose questions for you via Instagram. Hope is the theme that is the center of almost all of these. If I can distill them, the most basic question is, What would you say to people, particularly young people, who have lost hope?

I’ve been there. And what I can say is that, when you’re feeling like you’ve lost hope, it’s a very passive experience, which is part of what makes it so depressing.

And that’s what I had to go through. There was all this hope when Obama was elected, in 2008. And, at the end of the day, a lot of people that had hope in our whole country had those hopes dashed.

I graduated. My dad died. My family had medical debt, because we live in the jankiest medical system in the developed world. My childhood home was on the precipice of being taken away by big banks. I’d be home, and there’d be bankers in cars parked in front of my house, taking pictures for the inevitable day that they were going to kick us out.

I was supposed to be the great first generation to go to college, and I graduated into a recession where bartending, legitimately, and waitressing, legitimately, paid more than any college-level entry job that was available to me. I had a complete lack of hope. I saw a Democratic Party that was too distracted by institutionalized power to stand up for working people. And I decided this is bullshit. No one, absolutely no one, cares about people like me, and this is hopeless. And I lost hope.

How did that manifest itself?

It manifested in depression. Feeling like you have no agency, and that you are completely subject to the decisions of people who do not care about you, is a profoundly depressing experience. It’s a very invisibilizing experience. And I lived in that for years. This is where sometimes what I do is speak to the psychology of our politics rather than to the polling of our politics. What’s really important for people to understand is that to change that tide and to actually have this well of hope you have to operate on your direct level of human experience.

When people start engaging individually enough, it starts to amount to something bigger. We have a culture of immediate gratification where if you do something and it doesn’t pay off right away we think it’s pointless.

But, if more people start to truly cherish and value the engagement and the work in their own back yard, it will precipitate much larger change. And the thing about people’s movements is that the opposite is very top-down. When you have folks with a profound amount of money, power, influence, and they really want to make something happen, they start with media. You look at these right-wing organizations, they create YouTube channels. They create their podcast stars. They have Fox News as their own personal ideological television outlet.

Legitimate change in favor of public opinion is the opposite. It takes a lot of mass-public-building engagement, unrecognized work until it gets to the point that it is so big that to ignore it threatens the legitimacy of mass-media outlets, institutions of power, etc. It has to get so big that it is unignorable, in order for these positions up top to respond. And so people get very discouraged here.

Going forward, what do you think is the optimal role for you to play?

With the Climate Justice Alliance, some communities here at home say that they don’t talk about leadership, they talk about being leaderful. And I think that people’s movements, especially in the United States, are leaderful. And we’re getting more people every day. The untold story is actually the momentum of what is happening on the ground. You have Starbucks that just unionized its first shops in Buffalo. I went up there to visit them. Sure, I went over there to support a mayoral election which didn’t ultimately pan out, but also to support a lot of what was going on. I would argue that if it wasn’t for that mayoral election and the amount of intensity and organizing and hope and attention, a lot of these workers who were organizing may have given up.

There is no movement, there is no effort, there is no unionizing, there is no fight for the vote, there is no resistance to draconian abortion laws, if people think that the future is baked in and nothing is possible and that we’re doomed. Even on climate—or especially on climate. And so the day-to-day of my day job is frustrating. So is everyone else’s. I ate shit when I was a waitress and a bartender, and I eat shit as a member of Congress. It’s called a job, you know?

So, yes, I deal with the wheeling and dealing and whatever it is, that insider stuff, and I advance amendments that some people would criticize as too little, etc. I also advance big things that people say are unrealistic and naïve. Work is like that. It is always the great fear when it comes to work or pursuing anything. You want to write something, and, in your head, it’s this big, beautiful Nobel Prize-winning concept. And then you are humbled by the words that you actually put on paper.

And that is the work of movement. That is the work of organizing. That is the work of elections. That is the work of legislation. That is the work of theory, of concepts, you know? And that is what it means to be in the arena.

[David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He is the author of “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.”]

  VIDEO February 11, 2022

No Knock | Gil Scott-Heron

In the wake of the "no knock" police killing of Amir Locke, we remember Gil Scott-Heron's telling of the story of the use no-knock by Richard Nixon and John Mitchell 50 years ago.

 

Chomsky: US Push to “Reign Supreme” Stokes the Ukraine Conflict

Soldiers with the 101st Airborne Division prepare to depart Fort Campbell, Kentucky, en route for Poland on February 15, 2022. U.S. troops are being deployed to aid NATO allies 

BYC.J. Polychroniou, Truthout

PUBLISHED February 16, 2022

Irrational political panic is as American a phenomenon as apple pie. It often arises as a result of a potential inability on the part of the powers-that-be to control the outcome of developments that may pose challenges to the interests of the existing socioeconomic order or to the status quo of the geostrategic environment. The era of the Cold War speaks volumes about this phenomenon, but it’s also evident in earlier periods — for example, the first Red Scare in the wake of World War I — and we can see clear parallels in the present-day situation with reactions to Ukraine and the rise of China as a global power.

In the interview that follows, world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky delves into the phenomenon of irrational political panics in the U.S., with an emphasis on current developments on the foreign policy front — and the dangers of seeking to maintain global hegemony in a multipolar world.

C.J. Polychroniou: The political culture in the United States seems to have a propensity toward alarmism when it comes to political developments that are not in tune with the economic interests, ideological mindset and strategic interests of the powers-that-be. Indeed, from the anti-Spanish panic of the late 1890s to today’s rage about Russia’s security concerns over Ukraine, and China’s growing role in world affairs and everything in between, the political establishment and the media of this country tend to respond with full-blown alarm to developments that are not in alignment with U.S. interests, values and goals. Can you comment about this peculiar state of affairs, with particular emphasis on what’s happening today in connection with Ukraine and China?

Noam Chomsky: Quite true. Sometimes it’s hard to believe. One of the most significant and revealing examples is the rhetorical framework of the major internal planning document of the early Cold War years, NSC-68 of 1950, shortly after “the loss of China,” which set off a frenzy in the U.S. The document set the stage for huge expansion of the military budget. It’s worth recalling today when strains of this madness are reverberating — not for the first time; it’s perennial.

The policy recommendations of NSC-68 have been widely discussed in scholarship, though avoiding the hysterical rhetoric. It reads like a fairytale: ultimate evil confronted by absolute purity and noble idealism. On one side is the “slave state” with its “fundamental design” and inherent “compulsion” to gain “absolute authority over the rest of the world,” destroying all governments and the “structure of society” everywhere. Its ultimate evil contrasts with our sheer perfection. The “fundamental purpose” of the United States is to assure “the dignity and worth of the individual” everywhere. Its leaders are animated by “generous and constructive impulses, and the absence of covetousness in our international relations,” which is particularly evident in the traditional domains of U.S. influence, the Western hemisphere, long the beneficiary of Washington’s tender solicitude as its inhabitants can testify.

Anyone familiar with history and the actual balance of global power at the time would have reacted to this performance with utter bewilderment. Its State Department authors couldn’t have believed what they were writing. Some later gave an indication of what they were up to. Secretary of State Dean Acheson explained in his memoirs that in order to ram through the huge planned military expansion, it was necessary to “bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’” in ways that were “clearer than truth.” The highly influential Sen. Arthur Vandenberg surely understood this as well when advising [in 1947] that the government must “scare the hell out of the American people” to rouse them from their pacifist backwardness.

There are many precedents, and the drums are beating right now with warnings about American complacency and naivete about the intentions of the “mad dog” Putin to destroy democracy everywhere and subdue the world to his will, now in alliance with the other “Great Satan,” Xi Jinping.

The February 4 Putin-Xi summit, timed with the opening of the Olympic games, was recognized to be a major event in world affairs. Its review in a major article in The New York Times is headlined “A New Axis,” the allusion unconcealed. The review reported the intentions of the reincarnation of the Axis powers: “The message that China and Russia have sent to other countries is clear,” David Leonhardt writes. “They will not pressure other governments to respect human rights or hold elections.” And to Washington’s dismay, the Axis is attracting two countries from “the American camp,” Egypt and Saudi Arabia, stellar examples of how the U.S. respects human rights and elections in its camp — by providing a massive flow of weapons to these brutal dictatorships and directly participating in their crimes. The New Axis also maintains that “a powerful country should be able to impose its will within its declared sphere of influence. The country should even be able to topple a weaker nearby government without the world interfering” — an idea that the U.S. has always abhorred, as the historical record reveals.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Delphi Oracle issued a maxim: “Know Thyself.” Worth remembering, perhaps.

As in the case of NSC-68, there is method in the madness. China and Russia do pose real threats. The global hegemon does not take them lightly. There are some striking common features in how U.S. opinion and policy are reacting to the threats. They merit some thought.

The Atlantic Council describes the formation of the New Axis as a “tectonic shift in global relations” with plans that are truly “head spinning”: “The sides agreed to more closely link their economies through cooperation between China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union. They will work together to develop the Arctic. They’ll deepen coordination in multilateral institutions and to battle climate change.”

We should not underestimate the grand significance of the Ukraine crisis, adds Damon Wilson, president of the National Endowment for Democracy. “The stakes of today’s crisis are not about Ukraine alone, but about the future of freedom,” no less.

Strong measures have to be taken right away, says Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: “President Biden should use every tool in his tool box and impose tough sanctions ahead of any invasion and not after it happens.” There is no time to dilly-dally with Macron-style appeals to the raging bear to temper his violence.

Received doctrine is that we must confront the formidable threat of China and stand firm on Ukraine, while Europe wavers and Ukraine asks us to tone down the rhetoric and pursue diplomatic measures. Luckily for the world, Washington is unflinching in its dedication to what is right and just, even if it is almost alone, as when it righteously invades Iraq and strangles Cuba in defiance of virtually uniform international protest, to take just two from a plethora of examples.

To be fair, adherence to the doctrine is not uniform. There’s deviation, most forcefully on the far right: Tucker Carlson, probably the most influential TV voice. He’s said we shouldn’t be involved in defending Ukraine against Russia — because we should be devoting all our resources to confronting the far more awesome China threat. Have to get our priorities straight in combating the Axis.

Warnings about Russia’s mobilization to invade Ukraine have been an annual media event since the crises of 2014, with regular reports of tens or hundreds of thousands of Russian troops preparing to attack. Today, however, the warnings are far more shrill, with a mixture of fear and ridicule for so-called Mad Vlad, whom the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman describes as a “one-man psychodrama, with a giant inferiority complex toward America that leaves him always stalking the world with a chip on his shoulder so big it’s amazing he can fit through any door,” or from another perspective, the Russian leader seeking in vain for some response to his repeated requests for some attention to Russia’s expressed concerns. An analysis by MintPress found that 90 percent of the opinion pieces in the three major national newspapers have adopted a hawkish militant stance, with a bare scattering of questioning — a familiar phenomenon, as in the days before the Iraq invasion and, in fact, routinely when the state has delivered the word.

As in the case of the Sino-Soviet conspiracy to gain “absolute authority over the rest of the world” in 1950, the word now is that the U.S. must act decisively to counter the threat of the New Axis to the “rule-based global order” that is hailed by U.S. commentators, an interesting concept to which I’ll return briefly.

The “tectonic shift” is not a myth, and it does pose a threat to the U.S. It threatens U.S. primacy in shaping world order. That’s true of both of the crisis areas, on the borders of Russia and of China. In both cases, negotiated settlements are within reach: regional settlements. If they are achieved, the U.S. will only have an ancillary role, which it may not be willing to accept even at the cost of inflaming extremely hazardous confrontations.

In Ukraine, the basic outlines of a settlement are well-known on all sides; we’ve discussed them before. To repeat, the optimal outcome for security of Ukraine (and the world) is the kind of Austrian/Nordic neutrality that prevailed through the Cold War years, offering the opportunity to be part of Western Europe to whatever extent they chose, in every respect apart from providing the U.S. with military bases, which would have been a threat to them as well as to Russia. For internal Ukrainian conflicts, Minsk II provides a general framework.

As many analysts observe, Ukraine is not going to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the foreseeable future. George W. Bush rashly issued an invitation to join, but it was immediately vetoed by France and Germany. Though it remains on the table under U.S. pressure, it is not an option. All sides recognize this. The astute and knowledgeable Central Asia scholar Anatol Lieven comments that “the whole issue of Ukraine’s NATO membership is in fact purely theoretical, so that, in some respects, this whole argument is an argument about nothing — on both sides, it must be said, Russian as well as the West.”

His comment brings to mind [Argentinian writer Jorge Luis] Borges’s description of the Falkland/Malvinas war: two bald men fighting over a comb.

Russia pleads security concerns. For the U.S., it is a matter of high principle: We cannot infringe on the sacred right of sovereignty of nations, hence the right to join NATO, which Washington knows is not going to happen.

On the Russian side, a formal pledge of non-alignment hardly increases Russian security, any more than Russian security was enhanced when Washington guaranteed to Gorbachev that “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction,” soon abrogated by Clinton, then more radically by W. Bush. Nothing would have changed if the promise had risen from a gentlemen’s agreement to a signed document.

The U.S. plea hardly rises to the level of comedy. The U.S. has utter disdain for the principle it proudly proclaims, as recent history once again dramatically confirms.

For Washington, there is a deeper issue: A regional settlement would be a serious threat to the U.S. global role. That concern has been simmering right through the Cold War years. Will Europe assume an independent role in world affairs, as it surely can, perhaps along Gaullist lines: Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, revived in Gorbachev’s 1989 advocacy of a “common European home,” a “vast economic space from the Atlantic to the Urals”? Even more unthinkable would be Gorbachev’s broader vision of a Eurasian security system from Lisbon to Vladivostok with no military blocs, shot down without discussion in the negotiations 30 years ago over a post-Cold War settlement.

The commitment to maintain the Atlanticist order in Europe, in which the U.S. reigns supreme, has had policy implications that reach beyond Europe itself. One crucial example was Chile in 1973, when the U.S. was working hard to overthrow the parliamentary government, finally succeeding with the installation of the murderous Pinochet dictatorship. A prime reason for destroying democracy in Chile was explained by its prime architect, Henry Kissinger. He warned that parliamentary social reforms in Chile might provide a model for similar efforts in Italy and Spain that might lead Europe on an independent path, away from subordination to U.S. control and the U.S. model of harsher capitalism. The domino theory, often derided, never abandoned, because it is an important instrument of statecraft. The issue arises again with regard to a regional settlement of the Ukraine conflict.

Much the same is true in the confrontation with China. As we’ve discussed earlier, there are serious issues concerning China’s violation of international law in the neighboring seas — though as the one maritime country that refuses even to ratify the UN Law of the Sea, the U.S. is hardly in a strong position to object. Nor does the U.S. alleviate these problems by sending a naval armada through these waters or providing Australia with a fleet of nuclear submarines to enhance the already overwhelming military superiority of the U.S. off the coasts of China. The issues can and should be addressed by the regional powers.

As in the case of Ukraine, however, there is a downside: The U.S. will not be in charge.

Also as in the case of Ukraine, the U.S. professes its commitment to high principle in taking the lead to confront the threat of China: its horror at China’s human rights abuses, which are doubtless severe. Again, it is easy enough to assess the sincerity of this stand. One revealing index is U.S. military aid. At the top, in a category by themselves, are Israel and Egypt. On the Israeli record on human rights, we can now refer to the detailed reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, reviewing the crimes of what they describe as the world’s second apartheid state. Egypt is suffering under the harshest dictatorship of its tortured history. More generally, for many years, there has been a striking correlation between U.S. military aid and torture, massacre, and other severe human rights abuses.

There is no more need to tarry on Washington’s concern for human rights than on its dedication to the sacred principle of sovereignty. The fact that these absurdities can even be discussed illustrates how deeply the rhetorical flights of NSC-68 permeate the intellectual culture.

Hebrew University lecturer Guy Laron usefully reminds us of another facet of the Ukraine crisis: the long struggle between the U.S. and Russia over control of Europe’s energy, again in the headlines today. Even before Russia was a player, the U.S. sought to shift Europe (and Japan) to an oil-based economy, where the U.S. would have the hand on the spigot. Much of Marshall Plan aid was directed to this end. From George Kennan to Zbigniew Brzezinski commenting on the invasion of Iraq (which he opposed, but felt might confer advantages to the U.S. with the anticipated control over major oil resources), planners have recognized that control over energy resources could provide “critical leverage” over allies. Later years saw many struggles in the Cold War framework Laron describes, now very prominent. Ukraine has had a large part in these confrontations.

Throughout, the shape of world order has of course been a driving concern of policy makers. For post-World War II Washington, there is only one acceptable form: under its leadership. And it must be a particular form of world order: the “rule-based international order,” which has displaced an earlier commitment to the “UN-based international order” established under U.S. lead after World War II. It’s not hard to discern the reasons for the transition in policy and accompanying commentary. In the rule-based order, the U.S. sets the rules.

The same was true in the UN-based order in the early years after World War II. U.S. global dominance was so overwhelming that the UN served virtually as a tool of U.S. foreign policy and a weapon against its enemies. Not surprisingly, the UN was highly regarded in U.S. popular and intellectual culture, along with the UN-based international order, guided by Washington.

That turned out to be a passing phase. The UN began to fall out of favor in U.S. elite opinion as it lurched out of control with the recovery of other industrial societies but particularly with decolonization, which brought discordant voices into the UN and also in independent structures such as the Non-Aligned Movement and many others — all very vocal and active, though effectively barred from the international information order dominated by the traditional imperial societies.

Within the UN there were calls for a “New International Economic Order” that would offer the Global South something better than a continuation of the large-scale robbery, violent intervention and subversion that the colonized world had enjoyed during the long reign of Western imperialism. There were other threats, such as a call for a New International Information Order that would provide some opportunity for voices of the former colonies to enter the international information system, a near monopoly of the imperial powers.

The masters of the world undertook vigorous campaigns to beat back these efforts, a major though largely ignored chapter of modern history — though not completely; there is some fine work of exposure and analysis.

One effect of the Global South’s disruptive efforts was to turn U.S. practice and elite opinion against the UN, no longer a reliable agency of U.S. power as it had been in the early Cold War years. Furthermore, the foundations of modern international law in the few UN treaties that the U.S. ratified became completely unacceptable as the years passed, particularly the banning of “the threat or use of force” in international affairs, a practice in which the U.S. is far in the lead. It is conventional to say that the U.S. and Russia engaged in proxy wars during the Cold War years — omitting the fact that with rare exceptions, these were conflicts in which Russia provided some support to victims of U.S. attack. All topics that should have far more prominence.

In this context, the “rule-based international order” became the favored pillar of world order, and there is much annoyance when China calls instead for the UN-based international order as it did at the rancorous March 2021 China-U.S. summit in Alaska (putting aside the sincerity of these pronouncements).

It’s intriguing to see how the conflict with China plays out in U.S. policy and discourse in other domains. A front-page story in The New York Times is headlined: “House Passes Bill Adding Billions to Research to Compete With China; The vote sets up a fight with the Senate, which has different recommendations for how the United States should bolster its technology industry to take on China.” The official name of the bill is “The America Competes Act of 2022” — meaning “compete” with China.

The passage of the bill was hailed in the left-liberal press: “The House gave President Joe Biden another reason to celebrate on Friday with the passage of a bill aimed at boosting competitiveness with China.”

Could Congress support research and development because it would help American society, as this bill surely would? Apparently not; only because it would “take on China.” Republicans reflexively opposed the bill as usual, in this case because it “concedes too much to China.” Republicans also opposed what they called “far left” initiatives such as addressing climate change. The bill was derided by House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy as the “coral reefs bill.” How does saving humanity from self-destruction help to compete with China?

A side comment: An amendment to the bill was introduced by Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Progressive Caucus, a call to release the near-$10 billion of the Afghan government held in New York banks, so as to help relieve the horrendous humanitarian crisis facing the population. It was voted down. Forty-four Democrats joined Republican brutality. It appears that the China-based Shanghai Cooperation Organization might be planning aid, more of the China threat.

There is no denying that China is a rising superpower confronting the U.S. Reporting a study of Harvard’s Belfer Center of International Affairs, Graham Allison argued further that the so-called Thucydides Trap is likely to lead to a U.S.-China war.

That cannot happen. U.S.-China war means simply: game over. There are critical global issues on which the U.S. and China must cooperate. They will either work together, or collapse together, bringing the world down with them.

One of the most striking developments in the international arena today is that while the U.S. is pulling back from the Mideast, and elsewhere, China is moving in but with a different strategic approach and overall agenda. Instead of bombs, missiles and coercive diplomacy, China is expanding its influence with the use of “soft power.” Indeed, U.S. overseas expansion was always overwhelmingly dependent on the use of hard power, and, as result, it would only leave black holes behind after its withdrawal. To what extent, as some might argue, is this the result of a young nation ignorant of history and with lack of experience in global affairs (although it would be hard to find any examples of benign imperialism)?

I don’t think the U.S. has forged new paths in Western imperial brutality. Simply consider its immediate predecessors in world control. British wealth and global power derived from piracy (such heroic figures as Sir Francis Drake), despoiling India by guile and violence, hideous slavery, the world’s greatest narcotrafficking enterprise, and other such gracious acts. France was no different. Belgium broke records in hideous crimes. Today’s China is hardly benign within its much more limited reach. Exceptions would be hard to find.

The two cases you mention have highly instructive features, brought out clearly, if unintentionally, by how they are depicted. Take an article in The New York Times about the growing China threat. The headline reads: “As the U.S. Pulls Back from the Mideast, China Leans in; expanding its ties to Middle Eastern states with vast infrastructure investments and cooperation on technology and security.”

That’s accurate; it’s one example of what’s happening all over the world. The U.S. is withdrawing military forces that have battered the Mideast region for decades in traditional imperial style. The evil Chinese are exploiting the retreat by expanding China’s influence with investment, loans, technology, development programs. What’s called “soft power.”

Not just in the Mideast. The most extensive Chinese project is the huge Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that is taking shape within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which incorporates the Central Asia states, India, Pakistan, Russia, now Iran, reaching to Turkey and with its eye on Central Europe. It may well include Afghanistan if it can survive its current catastrophe. Chinese aid and development might manage to shift the Afghan economy from heroin production for Europe, the core of the economy during the U.S. occupation, to exploitation of its rich mineral resources.

The BRI has offshoots in the Middle East, including Israel. There are accompanying programs in Africa, and now even Latin America, over strenuous U.S. objections. Recently, China announced that it’s taking over the manufacturing facilities in São Paulo that Ford abandoned, and will initiate large-scale electric vehicles production, an area in which China is far ahead.

The U.S. has no way to counter these efforts. Bombs, missiles, special forces raids in rural communities just don’t work.

It’s an old dilemma. Sixty years ago in Vietnam, U.S. counterinsurgency efforts were stymied by a problem that was despairingly recognized by U.S. intelligence and by Province Advisers: the Vietnamese resistance — the Viet Cong (VC), in U.S. discourse — were fighting a political war, a domain in which the U.S. was weak. The U.S. was responding with a military war, the arena in which it is strong. But that couldn’t overcome the appeal of VC programs to the peasant population.

The only way the Kennedy administration could react to the VC political war was by U.S. Air Force bombing of rural areas, authorizing napalm, large-scale crop and livestock destruction and other programs to drive the peasants to virtual concentration camps where they could be “protected” from the guerillas who the U.S. knew they were supporting. The consequences we know.

Earlier, the dilemma had been explained by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, addressing the National Security Council about U.S. problems with Brazil, where elites, he said, are “like children, with no capacity for self-government.” Worse still, in his words, the U.S. is “hopelessly far behind the Soviets in developing controls over the minds and emotions of unsophisticated peoples” of the Global South, even educated elites. Dulles lamented to the president about the Communist “ability to get control of mass movements, … something we have no capacity to duplicate. The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich.”

Dulles left unsaid the obvious: The poor people somehow don’t respond well to our appeal of the rich to plunder the poor, so with great reluctance we have to turn to the arena of violence, where we dominate.

That’s not unlike the dilemma posed when China “leans in” to the Global South by “expanding its ties with vast infrastructure investments and cooperation on technology and security.” That is one central element of the China threat that is eliciting such fears and anguish.

The U.S. is reacting to this growing China threat in the arena where it is strong. The U.S. of course has overwhelming military dominance worldwide, even right off the coast of China. But it’s being enhanced. Last December, military analyst Michael Klare reports, President Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act. It calls for “an unbroken chain of U.S.-armed sentinel states — stretching from Japan and South Korea in the northern Pacific to Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore in the south and India on China’s eastern flank” — meant to encircle China.

Klare adds that, “Ominously enough Taiwan too is included in the chain of armed sentinel states.” The word “ominously” is well chosen. China of course regards Taiwan as part of China. So does the U.S., formally. The official U.S. one-China policy recognizes Taiwan as part of China, with a tacit agreement that no steps will be taken to forcefully change its status. Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo chipped away at this formula. It’s now being driven to the brink. China has the choice of either succumbing or resisting. It is not going to succumb.

This is only one component of the program to defend the U.S. from the China threat. A complementary element is to undermine China’s economy by means too well-known to review. In particular [in the U.S.’s eyes], China must be prevented from advancing in the technology of the future — actually extending its lead in some areas, such as electrification and renewable energy, the technologies that might save us from our race to destroy the environment that sustains life.

One aspect of these efforts to undermine China’s progress is to pressure other countries to reject superior Chinese technology. China has found a way to get around these efforts. They are planning to establish technical schools in countries of the Global South to teach advanced technology — Chinese technology, which graduates will then use. Again, the kind of aggression that is hard to confront.

U.S. influence is clearly declining across the international system, but one would not easily reach this conclusion by looking at the current U.S. National Security Strategy, which is still designed around the principle of the “two-war” doctrine even without expressly saying so. In this context, could it be argued that the U.S. empire is weakening in the 21st century, and that the end of the U.S. empire might not be a peaceful event?

It has been widely predicted in foreign policy circles for many years that China is poised to surpass the U.S. and to dominate world affairs, a dubious prospect, in my opinion, unless the U.S. continues on its current course of self-destruction, probably to be accelerated with the predicted congressional victory of the denialist party in November.

As we have discussed before, for some years the former Republican Party has been more accurately described as a “radical insurgency” that has abandoned normal parliamentary politics, to borrow the terms of political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute a decade ago — when Trump’s takeover of the insurgency was not yet a nightmare.

The Trump administration established a two-war doctrine in all but name. A war between two nuclear powers can quickly get out of control, meaning the end.

A step towards utter irrationality was taken last December 27, perhaps in celebration of Christmas, when President Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act, discussed earlier, enhancing the policy of “encirclement” of China, “containment” being out of date. That includes formation of the Quad: U.S.-India-Japan-Australia, supplementing the AUKUS alliance (Australia, U.K., U.S.) and the Anglosphere’s Five Eyes, all of them strategic-military alliances confronting China. China has only a troubled hinterland. As discussed earlier, the radical military imbalance in favor of the U.S. is being enhanced by other provocative acts, carrying great risk. Apparently we cannot let down our guard with the Axis powers on the march once again.

It’s all too easy to sketch a likely trajectory that is far from a pleasant prospect. But we should never forget the usual proviso. We do not have to be passive spectators, thereby contributing to potential disaster.

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C.J. Polychroniou


C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project. He has published scores of books and over 1,000 articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into a multitude of different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).
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