UK Rwanda asylum plan against international law, says UN refugee agency

By Doug Faulkner & Joseph Lee
BBC News

IMAGE SOURCE,PA MEDIA

Plans to send some asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda are a breach of international law, the UN's refugee agency has said.

The UNHCR said attempting to "shift responsibility" for claims of refugee status was "unacceptable".

Boris Johnson has said he believes the scheme complies with international law.

Meanwhile, it has emerged that Priti Patel issued a "ministerial direction" to launch the policy amid concerns from Home Office civil servants.

Civil servants could not precisely quantify the benefits of the policy and uncertainty about the costs meant the home secretary had to take personal responsibility for it by issuing the direction.

A source close to Ms Patel said that "deterring illegal entry would create significant savings" and the fact that the savings could not be quantified precisely should not prevent action from being taken.

Ministerial directions have been used 46 times since the 2010 election, with two in the Home Office since 1990, according to the Institute for Government think tank.

The only other time the formal order was used by the Home Office was in 2019 by the former home secretary Sajid Javid, to bring in the Windrush Compensation Scheme before legislation was in place.

Under the £120m scheme, people deemed to have entered the UK unlawfully since 1 January could be flown to Rwanda, where they will be allowed to apply for the right to settle in the east African country.

The government said the first flights could begin within weeks, initially focusing on single men who crossed the Channel in small boats or lorries.

More than 160 charities and campaign groups have urged the government to scrap the plan, while opposition parties and some Conservatives have also criticised the policy.

• Is Rwanda a land of safety or fear?
• Analysis: Rwanda deal does what no country has done before
• Which other countries send asylum seekers overseas?

Gillian Triggs, an assistant secretary-general at the UNHCR, told BBC Radio 4's the World At One programme the agency strongly condemned "outsourcing" the responsibility of considering refugee status to another country.

A former president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, she said such policies - as used in Australia - could be effective as a deterrent but there were "much more legally effective ways of achieving the same outcome".

Australia has used offshore detention centres since 2001, with thousands of asylum seekers being transferred out of the country since then.

It has been frequently criticised by the UN and rights groups over substandard conditions at its centres and its own projections show it will spend $811.8m (£460m) on offshore processing in 2021-22.

Ms Triggs pointed out Israel had attempted to send Eritrean and Sudanese refugees to Rwanda, but they "simply left the country and started the process all over again".

"In other words, it is not actually a long-term deterrent," she said.

Shadow justice minister Ellie Reeves called the policy "unworkable" and said if Labour was in charge, it would make it illegal to advertise people smuggling on social media and work more closely with France and others to tackle trafficking gangs.

Just another risk to factor in

By Jessica Parker, at a camp in Dunkirk, northern France

No-one we initially spoke to yesterday seemed to know about the Rwanda announcement - but it wasn't long before word spread.

Soon a group of men was asking us lots of questions: "When will this happen? Why? If I come from Afghanistan will it still apply to me?"

Shafi, who told me he had fled Afghanistan, said: "[Rwanda] is a lot worse place than Afghanistan, there is no future for us in Rwanda."

But I didn't meet anyone who said the government's plans would prevent them from trying to cross the Channel, including Shafi, who said he had no choice.

Many of these men have already faced huge risks to get this far and are willing to risk their lives crossing the Channel on a small boat.

The risk of being sent to Rwanda, at this stage, seemed like just another thing to factor in down the line.

A number of lawyers have warned the plan will face legal obstacles, such as the international human rights principle of "non-refoulement" - which guarantees no one can be returned to a country where they would face irreparable harm.

Last year, the UK government raised concerns at the UN about allegations of "extrajudicial killings, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances and torture" in Rwanda, as well as restrictions to civil and political rights.

But justice and migration minister Tom Pursglove said Rwanda was a progressive country that wanted to provide sanctuary and had made "huge strides forward" in the past three decades.

And a Home Office spokesperson added: "Rwanda will process claims in accordance with the UN Refugee Convention, national and international human rights laws, and will ensure their protection from inhuman and degrading treatment or being returned to the place they originally fled. There is nothing in the UN Refugee Convention which prevents removal to a safe country."

Ms Patel said the British public had been "crying out for change for years" and it was "incredibly unfair to the British public to see organisations in their own country effectively just putting blockages after blockages in the way".

The announcement came as part of a broader strategy to reduce the number of people entering the UK by crossing the Channel in small boats.

The Royal Navy has taken operational command of the Channel from UK Border Force in an effort to detect every boat headed to the UK.

Some 562 people on 14 boats made the journey on the day the new scheme was announced, according to the Ministry of Defence. No-one making the crossing was believed to have arrived on UK soil "on their own terms", it added.

Last year, 28,526 people made the crossing, up from 8,404 in 2020.

 

Mustafa Barghouti speaks to MEE from al-Aqsa complex hours after Israeli raid
Mohamed Hashem

15 April 2022 16:45 UTC | Last update: 6 hours 5 mins ago

UK
Tory MP convicted of sexual assault ‘bullied staff’ for years

Multiple former members of Imran Ahmad Khan’s staff questioned the Conservative Party’s vetting process for MPs.

British MP Imran Ahmad Khan | Neil Hall/AFP via Getty Images

BY ESTHER WEBBER

POLITICO.UK
April 15, 2022 

A Conservative MP convicted of sexual assault this week had a history of “bullying behavior” toward staff and “should never have been selected to stand for parliament,” according to multiple former members of staff and party colleagues who claim to have had long-standing concerns about Imran Ahmad Khan’s behavior.

The case puts further pressure on the Conservative Party over its vetting process for MPs and how it handles complaints by staff, following recent reports about another Tory MP in the Sunday Times.

On Monday, Khan was found guilty of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old in 2008, a verdict he has said he will appeal. He initially vowed to remain an MP while he fights the conviction, but resigned Thursday after being contacted regarding bullying allegations.

Two former staff members said that Khan would frequently scream and shout at his employees, leaving them distressed. A recording of one rant in which he berated his team for almost two hours was shared with POLITICO.

One assistant was signed off sick after bullying, according to colleagues, and left politics as a result. Another member of staff said their treatment resulted in panic attacks and the use of anti-anxiety medication.

Khan employed several young men who had recently graduated and whom he could “intimidate,” two ex-staffers and a party official said, while he was “misogynistic” in his behavior towards women. Parliamentary records show he had a high turnover of staff, with workers rarely lasting more than a few months.

After Khan was charged with sexual assault, he discussed details of the case with his office. A recording of that conversation was shared with POLITICO. Khan dismissed the victim as politically motivated and members of the justice system as “biased.” He suggested inviting a documentary crew to follow him round in order to release a film when he had cleared his name.

Ex-colleagues also spoke of inappropriate office management. Khan rented a large three-bedroom house in Wakefield as his constituency office, paying extra on top of the taxpayer-funded allowance, and used it to store personal belongings including beds and other furniture while aides were “crammed” together in one room unable to socially distance. He attempted to rent out rooms in the Wakefield property, offering them to his staff.

The local party was aware of his behavior but was itself paralyzed by infighting, members said. Khan was selected to fight the seat of Wakefield in Yorkshire at the last minute after the previous candidate was deselected because of offensive social media posts. He was elected to parliament in 2019.

A party member who worked with Khan raised concerns about his conduct to her employer after he repeatedly shouted at her, and the employer complained to the Conservative Party headquarters in March 2021, according to two people familiar with the case. The complainant said they received assurances the matter had been dealt with internally.

A party official said they had no record of the complaint, and stressed that vetting processes had been reviewed since 2019.

Staff who say they were bullied by Khan called for an inquiry into how he was selected in the first place and his behavior not picked up, as well as safeguards to prevent anything similar happening again. Conservative Party Campaign Headquarters declined to comment.

“It’s hard not to conclude there’s something seriously wrong with the vetting process,” said one former staffer. “He should never have been selected.”

Khan had the Conservative whip withdrawn after he was charged, meaning he was kicked out of the party in Westminster and could only stay in the House of Commons as an independent MP, and was fully expelled from the party after being found guilty. He declined to comment on any of the allegations his former colleagues raised with POLITICO.

U.S. Seafood Imports Helping Fuel Russian War Machine

By Associated Press
April 15, 2022

Despite a U.S. ban on seafood imports from Russia, it is still finding its way in by way of China.

A U.S. ban on seafood imports from Russia over its invasion of Ukraine was supposed to sap billions of dollars from Vladimir Putin’s war machine.

But shortcomings in import regulations mean that Russian-caught pollock, salmon and crab are likely to enter the U.S. anyway, by way of the country vital to seafood supply chains across the world: China.

Like the U.S. seafood industry, Russian companies rely heavily on China to process their catch. Once there, the seafood can be re-exported to the U.S. as a “product of China” because country of origin labeling isn’t required.

The result is that nearly a third of the wild-caught fish imported from China is estimated to have been caught in Russian waters, according to an International Trade Commission study of 2019 data. For pollock and sockeye salmon, the rate is even higher — 50% to 75%.

“China doesn’t catch cod. They don’t catch pollock. But yet, they’re one of the largest exporters of these whitefish in the world,” said Sally Yozell, a former policy director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who now is a senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington. “Having it labeled as a Chinese product is really not fair to the consumers and to restaurants.”

Fishing is big business in Russia, one closely linked to the Kremlin and Putin’s projection of power at sea. The country is the one of the world's top seafood producers and was the eighth-largest exporter to the U.S. last year, with more than $1.2 billion worth of sales, the bulk of it king crab.

But it’s unknown exactly how much manages to land in the U.S. by way of China, which sent another $1.7 billion in fish to the U.S. last year. Nor does the Biden administration’s ban require companies importing from China to find out.

Among Russia’s biggest seafood exports is Alaska pollock. A cousin of cod, Alaska pollock is the most harvested fish in the U.S., showing up in everything from imitation crabmeat to McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish. Every year, giant, floating factories in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska catch 1.5 million metric tons of the fish.

But the same species is also harvested in Russia in similar amounts, and once processed and imported from China, fills an important gap in the U.S. market. In lieu of tracing the country of origin, U.S. producers rely on the name recognition of Alaska pollock to signal where the fish was caught.

Even before the invasion of Ukraine, pressure had been building to prevent what Sen. Dan Sullivan, a Republican of Alaska, called “authoritarian” pollock from entering the U.S. Putin banned U.S. seafood in 2014 following American sanctions to punish him for the invasion of Crimea that year. Since then Russian exports entering the U.S. duty free have nearly quadrupled in value.

While overshadowed by Russia’s role as an energy powerhouse, Russia’s seafood industry has increasingly been flexing its own muscle with strong support from the Kremlin.

At a congressional hearing this month on the Russian seafood ban, Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat, led calls for the expansion of NOAA’s Seafood Import Monitoring Program, which aims to prevent illegal seafood from entering U.S. supply chains by tracking shipments from the point of catch. Currently the program covers just 13 species, only two of which — red king crab and Atlantic cod — are fished by Russia.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

The forgotten Egyptians who helped to find Tutankhamun

A new exhibition is bringing to life the workers without whom the boy king's tomb might never have been discovered

APRIL 15,2022

In the year that Egypt secured its independence, the discovery of the 3,000-year-old tomb of one of its ancient rulers, the boy king Tutankhamun, was portrayed as a triumph for the colonial old guard.

The uncovering of remarkable treasures in 1922 was the culmination of a five-year hunt funded by a British aristocrat and led by an obstinate English excavator who were propelled to international stardom by the find.

The efforts of dozens of Egyptians who were central to the greatest event in archaeological history were largely sidelined in the official record. But a new examination of photos and documents from the archive of the leader of the expedition, Howard Carter, has cast new light on the role of the Egyptian foreman and dozens of workers whose efforts were crucial to its success.

READ MORE

Egypt is spending billions to preserve and promote its cultural heritage, minister says

“The excavation was not achieved by a solitary heroic English archaeologist, but by the modern Egyptian team members, who have so often been overlooked and written out of the story,” said Richard Bruce Parkinson, a professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford.

Carter’s own diary and documents fail to shed light on how the hidden steps to the vault were revealed. His own diary records a scribbled single line on November 4 1922: “First steps of tomb found.”

Carter’s non-academic background and love of a far-fetched yarn has led to various theories — few of them backed by the official records.

Researchers say it was likely to have been a team effort — the melding of local knowledge and Carter’s own obsessive hunt for a missing tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.

The discoveries it yielded were remarkable. The tomb was small and hastily repurposed for a king of minor historical importance who died before his time, aged about 19, but remains the only royal burial from ancient Egypt to survive largely intact.

It took a decade to remove the 5,000 objects inside, a process recorded by the celebrated Harry Burton, who was known as the “Pharaohs’ Photographer” for his work recording expeditions in Egypt.

These photos and Carter’s papers provide an insight into the work of local labourers in discovering and collecting the treasures.

Carter names, and thanks, four Egyptians in his papers, but Burton’s pictures show how many more were involved.

“Even today, absolutely nothing would work without the Egyptians and Egyptian team members,” said Dr Daniela Rosenow, the co-curator of a new exhibition Tutankhamun: Excavating the Archive. “We can see in his images, he employed about 50 additional local workmen and dozens of children, which was standard practice in those days.

“The European archaeologists wrote their diaries and journals, but most of the Egyptians probably couldn't read or write.

“What they did was go home in the evening and tell their families what they had seen. At least with the photographs, we can assess their contribution and see what really, really vital role they played in the excavation.”

Carter, the son of an artist, had no formal archaeological training, and relied on the Egyptian workforce to understand the landscape and spot where a rock had been cut by ancient hand as he hunted for the lost tomb.

Compared with many of his upper-class colleagues of the time, he was a staunch defender of his Egyptian staff. He was fired from a previous job for defending Egyptian guards during a dispute with a group of western tourists who wanted access to a restricted site, said Prof Parkinson.

Among those he thanks in his papers is his foreman Ahmed Gerigar, who organised the dozens of workmen. But archivists have been unable to put his name to a photo in the archive and little is known about him or his fellow workers.

Their place in the archaeological pecking order is starkly illustrated in a photograph taken by Lord Carnarvon, the backer of the project, at a lunch of experts brought in to examine the preserve the finds.

The seven men seated around a table are all white and western. Two Egyptians were present, but they were waiters plucked from a luxury hotel in Luxor to serve the men their lunch.

Lunch in the tomb of Ramses XI. Photo: The Bodleian Libraries/University of Oxford

Other photographs showed the reality for many of the local Egyptian workers, who were hired for the hardest tasks such as moving the packaged treasures from the Valley of the Kings on the first stage of the 400-mile journey by barge to Cairo.

In May 1923, that involved 50 workmen working for 18 hours over two days moving 34 crates five miles to the nearest river in temperatures that reached over 38ºC in the shade. They laid short stretches of track and pushed the loaded trucks before starting the whole process again.

Moving crates from the Valley of the Kings by rail. Photo: The Bodleian Libraries/University of Oxford

But the archive also shows Egyptians inside the tomb working alongside Carter as trusted and essential members of the team, even if they do not get the recognition that they deserve.

“I think the archive shows how important they were for all of the work that was done excavating in Egypt. But it also reveals the inequalities,” said Prof Parkinson.

“We have photographs of them working together, but we can't match the names to the photographs.

“So while there was respect, it was very much within a very colonial context. But seeing faces and knowing their names were not recorded … I think that is really heartbreaking.

“It's going to be very difficult to reclaim those lost histories, there's so little written evidence. And I think that's where the photographs really come into their own because they can imply a whole world of information. It's just the names, we don't have the names.”

The centrepiece of the exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, England, is a picture of an Egyptian boy wearing a necklace recovered from the tomb.

Photograph of an Egyptian boy wearing a heavy jewelled necklace from the tomb. Photo: Griffith Institute/University of Oxford

It is one of the rare photographs of a member of the Egyptian team centre-frame taken by the colonial adventurers within the portfolio. Others mainly capture Egyptians working alongside or helping with the project — but usually in the shadow of the English archaeologists.

“Our archive was created by the English excavators. And it only tells one part of the story,” said Dr Rosenow. “If you have a look into the boy's face, you can clearly see a much more complex human reaction. You can feel that he is literally feeling the weight, the physical weight of this necklace, but also the weight of the past on his shoulders.”

His identity remains unknown even though a number of people have since come forward to claim the young man was a relative.

Despite the apparent inequalities between the English and local workers on the dig, newly-independent Egypt, which had been occupied since 1914 as a British protectorate, was at least able to keep the treasures on its soil.

Attitudes were changing after the widespread looting of antiquities by British forces during the previous century. The papers show that Carnarvon envisaged seeing recovered artefacts on display in England.

In a letter in the same month as the initial discovery, he wrote to a fellow Egyptologist in the UK about the discoveries.

“There is enough stuff to fill the whole Egyptian section upstairs of the B.M. [British Museum],” he wrote. “I imagine it is the greatest find ever made.”

But a pre-independence agreement he signed meant that anything recovered by the team from an intact tomb remained the property of Egypt.

The discovery just months after Egypt became independent meant that Tutankhamun became an icon of that campaign. The stunning gold funerary mask that was laid on the face of the mummified body was celebrated as the face of a nation with roots 3,000 years in the past.

Visits to the site — and photographs of the work in progress during the decade of work — were jealously guarded by the British-led team and Egyptians accused Carnarvon of exploiting the site for his own commercial gain. Carnarvon’s death a few months later from an infected mosquito bite was seized on by a hostile local press with sensational stories that he had been struck down by an ancient curse for breaking into the tomb.

The raw politics of the dig halted the work for almost a year in a dispute over access to the site. The photos also show significantly more local officials present during the highly-sensitive autopsy of the body carried out by the Egyptian, Dr Saleh Bey Hamdi, the head of the government school of medicine in Cairo.

The official committee observing the first incision. Photo: The Bodleian Libraries/University of Oxford

During the course of the tomb’s clearance, the newly-independent government ensured that the treasures would go on display at a museum in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Most have been moved to the $1 billion Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, which could open to coincide with the centenary of the discovery of the Tutankhamun tomb in November to bolster the vital tourism industry of the country.

“Egyptian independence happened just a few months before the discovery of the tomb,” said Dr Rosenow. “It massively shaped this new nationalist idea and they were very proud of Tutankhamun.

“His face, his funerary mask, become the icon of this newfound nation and they were extremely proud of him.”

Tutankhamun: Excavating the Archive at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford runs until February 2023

Kazakhstan: Labor unrest troubles another Chinese project

Kazakh officials know they cannot be seen siding with a Chinese company.

Apr 15, 2022

Chinese investors have hit a bumpy stretch of road. 

(David Trilling/Eurasianet file photo)

Earlier this week, almost 100 workers building a road between two settlements in Kazakhstan’s southern Zhambyl region downed their tools.

They were dissatisfied with salaries paid out by the Chinese subcontractor: between $130 and $260 per month for 10-hour workdays, they said.

They also accused the company, a subsidiary of China Xinxing Construction & Development Co., of failing to provide them with appropriate work clothes.

The company has so far refused to meet their demands.

In an April 12 interview with the Atameken business channel, the Chinese chief engineer for the project said that the company could not raise wages as the costs of materials had soared in recent years, turning the project into a loss-maker. He added that he expected the problem related to clothing to be solved in the coming days.

Atameken’s report on the standoff indicated that local authorities had sided with the workers and that a failure to improve working conditions could see labor inspectors get involved.

Worker unrest has been rippling across Kazakhstan in recent months, the latest cause for Chinese investors to reconsider ventures in the country.

The coronavirus choked cross-border trade and slowed or scuppered several pre-agreed projects. January brought the biggest and bloodiest bout of political instability in Kazakhstan’s modern history. Popular opposition to Chinese investments has fomented several political protests since 2016, and bubbled under the surface of many others.

The road through Kyzylorda is part of the $9 billion Nurly Zhol infrastructure program that Kazakhstan rolled out in 2014 and which was supposed to dovetail with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), unveiled in the Kazakh capital the year before.

Vast Kazakhstan’s road and rail networks needed to be upgraded and expanded anyhow.

But the promise of potentially billions of dollars in Chinese industrial investments after the two countries agreed to formally align their visions offered a clear incentive for Nur-Sultan to ramp up connectivity.

In 2016, the two countries struck deals for over 50 joint projects, as Kazakhstan promoted itself as the “buckle” in the BRI.

Only a few have come to fruition.

A Eurasianet review of ongoing investment projects listed on the websites of Kazakhstan’s 14 provincial administrations found that only 24 out of 542 projects at various stages of completion involved Chinese investors.

The business portal LSM.kz meanwhile has tracked several Chinese pull-outs.

This month LSM cited the Aktobe regional administration, in Kazakhstan’s oil-rich west, as saying that a Chinese firm had backed out of a $35 million project to produce carbon black, a sooty crude oil derivative used in a number of industrial settings, including tire manufacturing.

In 2020, LSM reported that Chinese firms had withdrawn from a $1.4 billion fertilizer production project in the same region, a tungsten development project worth nearly $1 billion in the central Karaganda region, and a deal to build a silicon plant worth $115 million in the northern region of Pavlodar.

One project delayed by the coronavirus but apparently still on the table is a float glass factory in Kyzylorda, which is expected to enter full production soon. Yet the factory has not been without scandal. Former economy minister Kuandyk Bishimbayev was convicted of embezzling more than $3 million from the project, which is being overseen by China Triumph International, a subsidiary of China National Building Material.

These are the kind of costs China has been prepared to live with in its Central Asia ventures. Indeed, it has often been perceived by local populations as facilitating precisely this sort of graft.

But the political turbulence that left more than 200 people dead in January, and appeared to hasten the exit from politics of Kazakhstan’s founding leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, may be a bigger consideration for Beijing, according to Central Asia-China-watcher Raffaello Pantucci.

While Kazakhstan’s regime is still as keen as ever for Chinese investment, the socioeconomic fragility that helped spark the nationwide protests may force the government to be more responsive to local concerns going forward, Pantucci wrote recently for the Straits Times.

“All of which is likely to mean China is going to find that Kazakhstan is not the entirely secure and predictable neighbor that it was,” he concluded.

Elizabeth Warren’s plan to break up Big Everything

“Shame on Congress for not sucking it up and doing what needs to be done,” the senator told Recode.

Christina Animashaun/Vox

LONG READ


By Sara Morrison 

VOX

 Apr 5, 2022, 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren loves talking about antitrust. In fact, she says, she can’t think of anything more fun to talk about.

Antitrust is not a topic most people associate with “fun,” but the Massachusetts Democrat’s passion for it is entirely believable. It’s not just the excitement and earnestness with which she talks about competition laws and how to change them; it’s also the fact that she has been talking about it for years. Longer, in fact, than many of the politicians who talk about it now.

She’s also why many of them are talking about it now. Warren took antitrust reform and anti-monopoly power out of relatively small academic and advocacy circles and thrust it into the national conversation. Then she ran for president and brought the phrase “break up Big Tech” — and the concept — into the mainstream. Now there’s an administration and a Congress in place that might actually do some of the things she’s been pushing for. And Warren is still talking, because she still has a lot of work to do.

“Getting everybody lined up to push back against a powerful, well-financed industry is tough,” Warren told Recode. “But the fact that it’s tough doesn’t mean it’s okay not to do the work. It just means shame on Congress for not sucking it up and doing what needs to be done.”

She’s referring to a package of bipartisan, Big Tech-targeted antitrust bills. Some of those would change things a lot; they could, indeed, break up Big Tech. Those bills are also going nowhere in Congress. The bills that are much more likely to pass — but whose progress has been slow — give a few massive companies new rules about how they can run their digital platforms and services.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign billboard 

made her intentions very clear.

 Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

If you’ve only been paying attention to the Big Tech antitrust reform movement for the last, say, year and a half, you may not realize how instrumental Warren has been in building it. She ceded much of that Break Up Big Tech spotlight to the prominent Big Tech critics heading up the two federal agencies that enforce antitrust laws — the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) — and the lawmakers heading up those antitrust bills. Warren isn’t on the Judiciary Committee that those bills came out of, and her name isn’t on any of them.

But now Warren has an even more ambitious project: Her new bill, the Prohibiting Anticompetitive Mergers Act, doesn’t just break up Big Tech: It breaks up Big Everything, and it prevents companies from getting too big in the future. It would also fundamentally change how agencies evaluate and block proposed mergers, a process that currently gives companies a lot of power and agencies relatively little. Warren says the bill crystallizes her vision for how the government can stop industry consolidation that has broken America’s markets, hurt its economy, and threatened its democracy.

The bill comes at a time when the auspicious beginnings of the Biden administration’s pro-competition, anti-monopoly agenda have given way to the reality of how difficult it is to actually get things done. With midterms approaching, however, things appear to be picking back up. Congress is poised to pass some of those antitrust bills and confirm Alvaro Bedoya, the Democratic commissioner the FTC needs to fully carry out its chair’s vision. Warren says she “gives props” for Biden’s pro-competition executive order, which is making progress. But Biden was also slow to officially support those antitrust bills, and his administration has pushed back on the European Union’s attempts to regulate Big Tech.

Elizabeth Warren has a few things to say about all that.

Mergers don’t just affect consumers — sometimes workers bear the impact

Why introduce a big new antitrust bill when Congress is close to passing a few other antitrust laws? The answer lies in chicken sandwiches.

The Big Tech antitrust bills address one industry, and only a few players in it. But many other industries have become hugely consolidated over the last several decades. Chicken, for example. That consolidation has been blamed for everything from the high prices you pay for that chicken to the low prices farmers are forced to sell their chickens for to the few poultry-producing giants out there. But the harm isn’t just in the prices, Warren says. It’s also in who makes sandwiches out of that chicken.
“When markets get very concentrated, we need to look at what we’ve lost”

“Think about two fast food chains in a region,” she said. “One of them does hamburgers almost exclusively, and the other one does chicken sandwiches almost exclusively.” They can merge, and keep their prices and products the same. As far as the consumer is concerned, nothing has changed for their wallet or their taste buds. Antitrust agencies, which typically only look at consumer welfare when reviewing mergers, will likely approve it. But mergers don’t just affect consumers: “The world has changed for those workers,” Warren said.

The two chains no longer have to compete with each other for employees by offering superior wages, benefits, and working conditions — so, Warren says, they don’t offer those things. Studies have shown that as markets become more concentrated, wages stagnate. And that means you might have less money to spend on that chicken sandwich. It’s more expensive, even if its price stays the same.

“If we want the benefits of competition, then it means when markets get very concentrated, we need to look at what we’ve lost,” Warren said. “Not just in terms of consumer choice. It’s very important, but it’s not the only thing.”

The bill would require antitrust agencies to take factors like impact on the labor market into account in addition to the impact on consumers. The bill isn’t limited to Big Tech (or chicken sandwiches), but Big Tech companies won’t be thrilled if the criteria for evaluating mergers expand — especially the ones that haven’t had to worry about consumer welfare standards because their products are free. That’s also assuming their proposed merger isn’t prohibited outright. Under Warren’s new bill, mergers over a certain size or that consolidate the market too much are forbidden. And consummated mergers that have harmed competition, workers, consumers, or competitors can be broken up.

The Prohibiting Anticompetitive Mergers Act also fundamentally changes the agencies’ merger review process and power. Right now, if companies want to merge, it’s on the FTC or the DOJ to make the case for why they shouldn’t, and they have to sue the companies to block them. The onus is entirely on the agencies, which oversee thousands of mergers a year. With relatively little in resources, they can only challenge a few of those mergers. Doing so may mean a long court battle that’s difficult to win.

“Getting everybody lined up to push back against a powerful, well-financed industry is tough,” Warren told Recode. “But the fact that it’s tough doesn’t mean it’s okay not to do the work. It just means shame on Congress for not sucking it up and doing what needs to be done.” 

Ken Cedeno/Getty Images

With Warren’s bill, it’s the companies that have to do the work. They have to show that their proposed merger won’t harm competition, consumers, and the labor market. If they can’t, the agencies have to reject it. The companies have to sue if they still want to merge. Ideally, companies will try to merge less, and the mergers they do try won’t be harmful.

“It’s going to change how mergers are even conceived of by the companies,” Alex Harman, director of government affairs, antimonopoly, and competition policy at Economic Security Project Action, said. “Because then it’s not like the game of Monopoly where it’s just collecting assets. It’s now going to be like, ‘Oh, I actually need to make a case for this,’ that there’s a lack of harm, and that there’s a benefit.”

It’s a seemingly complicated bill that tries to make things simpler. Instead of adding regulations to one industry that its most powerful players can figure out how to work around, she just wants to break them apart.

“Structural change, where possible, minimizes regulation and maximizes the benefits of a functioning market,” Warren said.

Charlotte Slaiman, competition policy director at nonprofit Public Knowledge, says she likes what the bill is trying to do and sees the need for it. But she’d like more antitrust experts to weigh in before the bill becomes law, because it’s such a big change: “to make sure that we’re getting the details right.”

And William Kovacic, a competition law professor at George Washington University and former Republican FTC chair, said the bill left him with too many questions on how it would actually work in practice. For example, he said, there’s a list of general things agencies have to consider when deciding to approve a merger, but not much detail or guidance beyond that. So it’s left to the agencies to create the definition of harms to competition, workers, and small and minority-owned businesses.

“And where you have lots of discretion, here come the political influencers from Congress, from the executive departments from the White House, the lobbyists all come parading into my office and tell me what to do,” Kovacic said. “If I’m going to have to do this, I just want to know how ... [Congress] can’t just drop this into my lap. You figure it out.”

How Warren went from taking on Big Banks to breaking up Big Tech

Warren’s political career has been defined by advocating for consumers, laborers, and small businesses against the big, powerful companies that make a lot of money at their expense. First, it was big banks in the wake of the financial crisis. Then she went broader: When she gave the keynote speech at New America’s Open Markets conference in 2016, she was one of the first nationally recognizable politicians in decades to talk about comprehensively addressing monopoly power. A week later, antitrust was on the Democratic party platform for the first time since 1988. A year later, it was a major part of its agenda.

“She fought hard behind the scenes to bring that back onto the platform,” Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), an anti-monopoly, small business advocacy group, told Recode.

It was a major part of Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign platform, and her call to break up Big Tech was one of the best-known parts of it. Her plan for that: reversing mergers like Meta’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, and prohibiting companies like Amazon from owning platforms while offering their own products on them. And although Warren was one of the first and most prominent figures to recognize the threat of Big Tech’s power and demand that it be reined in, she wouldn’t be the last.

In the years since, we’ve seen a massive House investigation into competition in digital markets and the bipartisan antitrust bills, some of which are quite similar to Warren’s campaign proposals. Her allies and so-called “acolytes” have key, influential positions in the Biden administration. That sweeping executive order promoting competition was partially written by former Warren aide Bharat Ramamurti, who is now a deputy director of the National Economic Council. And Warren strongly advocated for Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter to head up the FTC and the DOJ’s antitrust division, respectively.

“Personnel is policy,” Warren said.

“With an FTC that is divided two-two, we’re not getting the work done over at the FTC that we need”

Personnel also isn’t perfect. Biden’s commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, criticized the European Union’s efforts to rein in Big Tech at an event for pro-business lobbying group the Chamber of Commerce, saying they disproportionately targeted American businesses. That’s a message the Biden administration seemed to echo in its endorsement of America’s antitrust bills. Warren has sent two letters to Raimondo since (neither answered) asking who she’s talking to in Big Tech and their lobbying groups.

“It is not the job of the Secretary of Commerce to echo the lobbyists’ talking points on behalf of Big Tech,” Warren said.

Other appointments don’t have the tools they need to do the job they want to do. Khan has a clear vision for how to approach antitrust in Big Tech (and beyond), and how to re-shape the FTC to carry it out. But she’s only had a few months in her tenure with the majority Democratic votes. Commissioner Rohit Chopra (another big Warren ally) left the FTC to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last fall. Republicans have held up his replacement’s confirmation for seven months — and counting.

“We are entirely committed to getting the FTC commissioner through,” Warren said. “And I understand the urgency of the moment on that. With an FTC that is divided two-two, we’re not getting the work done over at the FTC that we need.”

Even a gridlocked FTC has been able to do some things. Lockheed Martin and Nvidia abandoned their acquisition plans when the FTC sued to block them. Khan and Kanter announced they would be rethinking merger guidelines over the next year. When Chopra was still on the commission, it was able to successfully re-file its lawsuit against Meta. But the FTC didn’t challenge Amazon’s merger with MGM. Microsoft and Google have announced huge mergers of their own. They don’t seem too worried that Khan’s FTC will be able to stop them. And while the DOJ is believed to be preparing to go after Google’s ad tech business, it also recently approved Discovery’s $43 billion merger with WarnerMedia. The Microsoft, Google, and Discovery acquisitions, by the way, would all be prohibited under Warren’s bill.

But Warren’s legislation isn’t what we’re likely to get. Those would be the Open App Markets Act and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. The first bill would force Apple and Google to open their devices up to alternate app stores and payment systems. The second would forbid Big Tech companies from preferencing their own products on their platforms. Amazon wouldn’t be able to give its Basics line special placement on its Marketplace and Google wouldn’t be able to give its restaurant rankings special placement on its search page.

While we wait for Democratic leaders in the House and Senate to give those antitrust bills a floor vote, Big Tech companies are doing everything they can to defeat them. They’ve spent record amounts of money on lobbying and tried to take their case against the bills to small businesses and the American people. They’ve bankrolled their own advocacy groups. Sen. Ted Cruz said that Apple CEO Tim Cook personally called him about the Open App Markets Act the night before it was voted out of the Judiciary committee (Cruz voted for the bill to advance). Some moderate Democrats, especially California’s lawmakers, are openly opposed to the bills, making cooperation (and votes) from Republicans especially important.

Sen. Warren’s political career has been defined by advocating for consumers, laborers, and small businesses against the big, powerful companies that make a lot of money at their expense. 

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Warren says Congress had a lot of essential issues on its plate to tackle, and that’s caused some of the delay. But she’s still frustrated that Congress hasn’t taken up antitrust as quickly as it could. Not just this session, either.

“Much of this work should have been done 15 years ago, before the concentration was as bad as it is,” she said.

Warren’s bills don’t have to pass to create change

Warren’s bill has been introduced in the Senate, with a companion version in the House. It’s got several cosponsors, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey, and Richard Blumenthal, and Reps. Katie Porter (a former Warren student), Mondaire Jones, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But none of them are Republicans, who balk at both the prospect of giving government agencies any authority and appearing to agree with Warren on anything. The incremental and targeted approach of Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who headed up the antitrust bills in the Senate, is different from Warren’s. It’s also the approach that will get the bipartisan support needed to pass anything now.

So will the Prohibiting Anticompetitive Mergers Act become law in this Congress? No, but that’s probably not the point. The bill is a look at what could be, and maybe sooner than you think. When Warren first started talking about antitrust reform back in 2016, any change at all seemed far away at best. It’s very close now. Don’t be too surprised if we see bills influenced by Warren’s vision become law in the future, or in the FTC’s and DOJ’s revised merger guidelines.

“She continues to be a major leader in articulating how we should think about concentrated market power and what we should do about it,” Mitchell, of the ILSR, said. “She’s continuing to lay out policy architecture that I’m certain will be influential.”

How influential does Warren think she’s been? Her initial answer was a rare (for her), “I don’t know.” But here’s what she does know: “These are good ideas and I’m willing to get out there and fight for them.”

“I’m willing to challenge both people in government and the big companies,” Warren said. “The status quo is letting giant companies rake off billions and billions of dollars in profits that, in competitive markets, would have stayed in the hands of consumers, employees, and small businesses. Today, they’re just getting shut out.”