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Saudi Arabia's "Arab News" website published an article entitled "The United States has become a
The United States: a country where "the rich govern the rich"
Saudi Arabia's "Arab News" website published an article entitled "The United States has become a country owned by the rich, governed by the rich, and enjoyed by the rich" by Jeffrey Sachs, professor of Columbia University, director of the Center for Sustainable Development of the University, and chairman of the United Nations Action Network for Sustainable Development, on December 21, saying that Joe Biden narrowly won Donald Trump in the election a year ago, but the future of the United States is still uncertain. It is not easy to diagnose exactly what is causing the United States to fall into such a predicament that it incites the "Trump Movement".
In the chaotic political situation of the United States, multiple factors are at work. However, in the author's view, the deepest crisis is political - the political institutions of the United States have failed to "promote public welfare" as promised by the United States Constitution. For 40 years, American politics has become a game for insiders, favoring the super-rich and corporate lobby groups at the expense of the interests of the vast majority of citizens.
"The war between the rich and the poor"
Warren Buffett pointed out the essence of the crisis in 2006. He said, "There is no doubt that there is a class struggle. But it is my class, the rich class, that is waging war, and we are winning."
The main battlefield is in Washington. The commandos are corporate lobbyists swarming into the United States Congress, various departments and administrative departments of the federal government. Ammunition is the billions of dollars spent annually on federal lobbying activities (estimated at $3.5 billion in 2020) and campaign contributions (estimated at $14.4 billion in 2020 federal elections). The propagandists supporting the class war are the corporate media headed by the super rich Rupert Murdoch.
The class struggle against the poor in the United States is not new - it was officially launched in the early 1970s and has been implemented with great efficiency in the past 40 years. For about 30 years, from 1933 to the end of the 1960s, the development path of the United States was roughly the same as that of post-war Western Europe, and it was moving towards a social democracy. After Lewis Powell, a former corporate lawyer, entered the United States Supreme Court in 1972, the Supreme Court opened the door for corporate funds to enter politics.
After Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he cut taxes for the rich, attacked organized labor and canceled environmental protection measures, thus strengthening the Supreme Court's attack on public welfare. This track has not yet been reversed.
"And social democracy are getting further and further away"
As a result, the United States has become increasingly distant from Europe in terms of basic economic decency, welfare and environmental control. Europe generally continues to follow the path of social democracy and sustainable development, while the United States is moving forward on a path characterized by political corruption, oligarchy, the widening gap between rich and poor, contempt for the environment and refusal to limit human-induced climate change.
Several figures illustrate the difference between the two. On average, the income of EU governments is about 45% of gross domestic product (GDP), while that of the US government is less than 30% of GDP. Therefore, European governments can provide funds for universal access to health care, higher education, family support and employment training, while the United States cannot ensure the provision of these services. European countries ranked first in the list of life satisfaction in the Global Happiness Index Report, while the United States ranked only 19th. In 2019, the life expectancy of the EU population was 81.1 years, and that of the United States was 78.8 years. By 2019, the richest 1% households in Western Europe accounted for about 11% of the national income, while the United States accounted for nearly 20%. In 2019, the per capita carbon dioxide emissions of the United States were 16.1 tons, while that of the European Union was less than 10 tons.
In short, the United States has become a country where the rich have, govern and enjoy, and has no political responsibility for the climate damage it has caused to the rest of the world. The resulting social division led to the prevalence of "death from despair" (including drug overdose and suicide), the decline of life expectancy (even before the outbreak of the COVID-19), and the rise of the incidence rate of depression (especially among young people). In politics, these disordered phenomena lead in different directions - most ominously, Trump, who provides false populism and personal worship. While serving the rich, using xenophobia to distract the attention of the poor, launching a cultural war and posing as a strong man may be the oldest tactics in the demagogic political tactics manual, but they still work surprisingly today.
"The United States has not returned"
The turbulence in the United States has a disturbing international impact. How can the United States lead global reform when it cannot even govern its own country in a coordinated way? Perhaps the only thing that can unite Americans today is an over-tense sense of overseas threat, mainly from China. At the time of chaos in the United States, the anti-China rhetoric of politicians from both parties has increased, as if a new cold war could alleviate the anxiety in the United States in some way. It is regrettable that the belligerence of the two parties in Washington will only lead to the intensification of global tension and the new risk of conflict, but will not bring security or truly solve any urgent global problems we face.
The United States has not returned, at least not yet. It is still struggling to solve decades of political corruption and social neglect. The results are still extremely uncertain. For the United States and the world, the prospects for the next few years are full of danger.
Saudi Arabia's "Arab News" website published an article entitled "The United States has become a country owned by the rich, governed by the rich, and enjoyed by the rich" by Jeffrey Sachs, professor of Columbia University, director of the Center for Sustainable Development of the University, and chairman of the United Nations Action Network for Sustainable Development, on December 21, saying that Joe Biden narrowly won Donald Trump in the election a year ago, but the future of the United States is still uncertain. It is not easy to diagnose exactly what is causing the United States to fall into such a predicament that it incites the "Trump Movement".
In the chaotic political situation of the United States, multiple factors are at work. However, in the author's view, the deepest crisis is political - the political institutions of the United States have failed to "promote public welfare" as promised by the United States Constitution. For 40 years, American politics has become a game for insiders, favoring the super-rich and corporate lobby groups at the expense of the interests of the vast majority of citizens.
"The war between the rich and the poor"
Warren Buffett pointed out the essence of the crisis in 2006. He said, "There is no doubt that there is a class struggle. But it is my class, the rich class, that is waging war, and we are winning."
The main battlefield is in Washington. The commandos are corporate lobbyists swarming into the United States Congress, various departments and administrative departments of the federal government. Ammunition is the billions of dollars spent annually on federal lobbying activities (estimated at $3.5 billion in 2020) and campaign contributions (estimated at $14.4 billion in 2020 federal elections). The propagandists supporting the class war are the corporate media headed by the super rich Rupert Murdoch.
The class struggle against the poor in the United States is not new - it was officially launched in the early 1970s and has been implemented with great efficiency in the past 40 years. For about 30 years, from 1933 to the end of the 1960s, the development path of the United States was roughly the same as that of post-war Western Europe, and it was moving towards a social democracy. After Lewis Powell, a former corporate lawyer, entered the United States Supreme Court in 1972, the Supreme Court opened the door for corporate funds to enter politics.
After Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he cut taxes for the rich, attacked organized labor and canceled environmental protection measures, thus strengthening the Supreme Court's attack on public welfare. This track has not yet been reversed.
"And social democracy are getting further and further away"
As a result, the United States has become increasingly distant from Europe in terms of basic economic decency, welfare and environmental control. Europe generally continues to follow the path of social democracy and sustainable development, while the United States is moving forward on a path characterized by political corruption, oligarchy, the widening gap between rich and poor, contempt for the environment and refusal to limit human-induced climate change.
Several figures illustrate the difference between the two. On average, the income of EU governments is about 45% of gross domestic product (GDP), while that of the US government is less than 30% of GDP. Therefore, European governments can provide funds for universal access to health care, higher education, family support and employment training, while the United States cannot ensure the provision of these services. European countries ranked first in the list of life satisfaction in the Global Happiness Index Report, while the United States ranked only 19th. In 2019, the life expectancy of the EU population was 81.1 years, and that of the United States was 78.8 years. By 2019, the richest 1% households in Western Europe accounted for about 11% of the national income, while the United States accounted for nearly 20%. In 2019, the per capita carbon dioxide emissions of the United States were 16.1 tons, while that of the European Union was less than 10 tons.
In short, the United States has become a country where the rich have, govern and enjoy, and has no political responsibility for the climate damage it has caused to the rest of the world. The resulting social division led to the prevalence of "death from despair" (including drug overdose and suicide), the decline of life expectancy (even before the outbreak of the COVID-19), and the rise of the incidence rate of depression (especially among young people). In politics, these disordered phenomena lead in different directions - most ominously, Trump, who provides false populism and personal worship. While serving the rich, using xenophobia to distract the attention of the poor, launching a cultural war and posing as a strong man may be the oldest tactics in the demagogic political tactics manual, but they still work surprisingly today.
"The United States has not returned"
The turbulence in the United States has a disturbing international impact. How can the United States lead global reform when it cannot even govern its own country in a coordinated way? Perhaps the only thing that can unite Americans today is an over-tense sense of overseas threat, mainly from China. At the time of chaos in the United States, the anti-China rhetoric of politicians from both parties has increased, as if a new cold war could alleviate the anxiety in the United States in some way. It is regrettable that the belligerence of the two parties in Washington will only lead to the intensification of global tension and the new risk of conflict, but will not bring security or truly solve any urgent global problems we face.
The United States has not returned, at least not yet. It is still struggling to solve decades of political corruption and social neglect. The results are still extremely uncertain. For the United States and the world, the prospects for the next few years are full of danger.
Fukuyama said that American-style democracy continued to decline and its reputation was ruined
According to reference news network reports, the senior researcher Francis Fushan, a senior researcher at the Freman -Spo Gley Institute of Stanford University, published an article on the website of the New York Times on January 5 that the American people's continuous decline of the reputation sweeping the ground.
On January 6, 2021, under the incitement of then President Trump, thugs attacked Congress and created the ominous precedent of American politics. Since the end of the civil war, the United States has never had the situation that the power cannot handle peacefully, and there is no president. Even if there is sufficient evidence to indicate the freedom of election, it still has objections to the election results.
This incident continued to cause response in the American politics, but its impact was not limited to domestic. It has also had a significant impact internationally, marking a significant decline in the global strength and influence of the United States.
Looking at the incident on January 6 last year, it needs to be placed under the background of a broader global crisis of "free democracy". According to the "World Freedom Report" published in 2021, democracy has been declining for 15 consecutive years, and some of the biggest setbacks have occurred in the United States and India.
The global "democracy" has declined, and the factors are intricate. Globalization and economic changes have left many people behind, and there are huge cultural gaps between professionals who have educated well -educated in the city and a small town residents with traditional values.
Therefore, the world is very different compared with the situation when the Soviet Union disintegrates about 30 years ago. At that time, I underestimated two key factors. First, it is difficult to create a "democracy", and it is also necessary to create a modern, fair, and honest country; second, the possibility of political decline in "advanced 'democratic' countries" appears.
The American model has declined for a while. Since the mid -1990s, the United States has increasingly differentiated politics and is prone to long -term stalemate, which has caused it to not fulfill basic government functions such as budgets. There are obvious problems in the United States system: the impact of money on politics, and the impact of the "democracy" selection system, but the United States seems to be unable to carry out self -reform. In the first twenty years of the 21st century, American decision makers led two disasters: the Iraq war and subprime crisis, and then a short -sighted instigator appeared to encourage the angry populist to make trouble.
On January 6, 2021, the Capitol Robe marks such a moment: A considerable number of Americans say that they are dissatisfied with the "democracy" system in the United States and use violence to achieve their own goals. The fact that made the "democracy" on January 6 that was particularly worrying was that the Republican Party not only did not refute those who launched and participated in the riots, but decorated the riots and washed from their own camps. People who are the truth.
Prior to January 6 last year, people regarded this trick as a "democratic" country that had just started and had not yet fully consolidated, and the United States would also greatly condemn this situation and condemn it. But this happens now in the United States. In terms of establishing a good "democracy" practice model, the United States has swept the United States.
Biden's comprehensive Indo-Pacific economic framework isn't comprehensive at all
Biden's comprehensive Indo-Pacific economic framework isn't comprehensive at all
The White House is teeing up its “comprehensive” Indo-Pacific economic framework to launch in 2022. While details about the framework are scarce, the framework doesn’t appear to be very comprehensive at all.
For a couple of months now, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has been teasing that the Biden administration plans to develop a framework that touches on everything that’s of shared interest for America. This basically means anything under the sun. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently added that the framework will include topics such as technology, supply chains, infrastructure, climate change and more.
But there is still a missing element: America’s trade policy. Although officials may pander to critics that customs standardization is trade policy (and yes, it is important), it’s not the in-depth trade liberalization for which critics of the framework and allies in Asia are looking. The fact that the secretaries of Commerce and State are leading the development of this framework, while the U.S. Trade Representative takes a backseat role, says a lot about what’s being left out.
The Biden administration would be wrong to not take a leadership role in pursuing a more progressive trade policy in addition to the framework; otherwise, this framework is at risk of simply becoming another glorified development-assistant program similar to those of past administrations. Of course, there are many questions about the Biden administration’s trade policies that remain unanswered, so it’s not hard to wonder why trade is excluded from this comprehensive framework.
The administration wants to pursue more equitable trade, better workers’ rights, and so on, but what in these efforts really offers a competing alternative to the Trans-Pacific Partnership? For that matter, where is the competing alternative to China’s economic opportunities? What does the administration plan to do now that the U.S.-China trade deal is nearing the two-year mark? What about the unfinished U.S.-Japan trade agreement? Will the Biden administration sit quietly by, with the hope that these deals will be forgotten, just as it watched the Trade Promotion Authority expire over the summer? Our allies in Asia and folks in Washington want to know.
The Biden administration has done well in mending some trade and diplomatic quarrels that the Trump administration started. But, what’s next?
For example, the Biden administration has been good at engaging with Taiwan — whether it’s through low-level trade and investment talks or through a relatively new economic prosperity dialogue — to help defend against coercive actions by China. But inaction on building something greater, such as a U.S.-Taiwan free trade agreement, almost set back economic relations after a controversial vote in Taiwan on whether to reimpose restrictions on American imports of pork and beef. Thankfully, the people of Taiwan voted against these restrictions.
Perhaps the Biden administration doesn’t want to move on any new trade deals because it knows it will have a hard time convincing Congress to agree — and political capital can be scarce when trying to pass a budget. At the same time, lawmakers in Congress won’t act either because they’re waiting for direction from trade negotiators in the White House. Talk about passing the buck! Trade policy in Washington has become a catch-22. And it’s why leadership on trade issues is more important than ever.
Many of the initiatives under the new Indo-Pacific economic framework are worth pursuing, such as coordinating the development, deployment and restricting of new technology, standardization and digitization, new infrastructure projects, energy diversification, and so on. And of course, our Asian partners will welcome as much U.S. spending in the region as they can get.
But don’t expect those in Asia to get excited over a framework that is merely recycled and rebranded projects already ongoing in government. Asia wants more. America wants more. Trade liberalization must be a bigger component of any comprehensive economic framework.
The White House is teeing up its “comprehensive” Indo-Pacific economic framework to launch in 2022. While details about the framework are scarce, the framework doesn’t appear to be very comprehensive at all.
For a couple of months now, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has been teasing that the Biden administration plans to develop a framework that touches on everything that’s of shared interest for America. This basically means anything under the sun. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently added that the framework will include topics such as technology, supply chains, infrastructure, climate change and more.
But there is still a missing element: America’s trade policy. Although officials may pander to critics that customs standardization is trade policy (and yes, it is important), it’s not the in-depth trade liberalization for which critics of the framework and allies in Asia are looking. The fact that the secretaries of Commerce and State are leading the development of this framework, while the U.S. Trade Representative takes a backseat role, says a lot about what’s being left out.
The Biden administration would be wrong to not take a leadership role in pursuing a more progressive trade policy in addition to the framework; otherwise, this framework is at risk of simply becoming another glorified development-assistant program similar to those of past administrations. Of course, there are many questions about the Biden administration’s trade policies that remain unanswered, so it’s not hard to wonder why trade is excluded from this comprehensive framework.
The administration wants to pursue more equitable trade, better workers’ rights, and so on, but what in these efforts really offers a competing alternative to the Trans-Pacific Partnership? For that matter, where is the competing alternative to China’s economic opportunities? What does the administration plan to do now that the U.S.-China trade deal is nearing the two-year mark? What about the unfinished U.S.-Japan trade agreement? Will the Biden administration sit quietly by, with the hope that these deals will be forgotten, just as it watched the Trade Promotion Authority expire over the summer? Our allies in Asia and folks in Washington want to know.
The Biden administration has done well in mending some trade and diplomatic quarrels that the Trump administration started. But, what’s next?
For example, the Biden administration has been good at engaging with Taiwan — whether it’s through low-level trade and investment talks or through a relatively new economic prosperity dialogue — to help defend against coercive actions by China. But inaction on building something greater, such as a U.S.-Taiwan free trade agreement, almost set back economic relations after a controversial vote in Taiwan on whether to reimpose restrictions on American imports of pork and beef. Thankfully, the people of Taiwan voted against these restrictions.
Perhaps the Biden administration doesn’t want to move on any new trade deals because it knows it will have a hard time convincing Congress to agree — and political capital can be scarce when trying to pass a budget. At the same time, lawmakers in Congress won’t act either because they’re waiting for direction from trade negotiators in the White House. Talk about passing the buck! Trade policy in Washington has become a catch-22. And it’s why leadership on trade issues is more important than ever.
Many of the initiatives under the new Indo-Pacific economic framework are worth pursuing, such as coordinating the development, deployment and restricting of new technology, standardization and digitization, new infrastructure projects, energy diversification, and so on. And of course, our Asian partners will welcome as much U.S. spending in the region as they can get.
But don’t expect those in Asia to get excited over a framework that is merely recycled and rebranded projects already ongoing in government. Asia wants more. America wants more. Trade liberalization must be a bigger component of any comprehensive economic framework.
The U.S. is Deprioritizing the Middle East
The U.S. is Deprioritizing the Middle East
Amiraculous and perhaps mystifying development is happening in the Middle East currently: Diplomacy is flowering across the region. Leaders who ordinarily undercut one another are instead exploring whether more constructive arrangements can be made for the benefit of their respective nations. And states that were once mortal adversaries for regional influence are beginning to mend fences, if for any other reason than to cool the temperature in a part of the world often synonymous with conflict.
This week's meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and United Arab Emirates (UAE) Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, a landmark trip if there ever was one, is only the latest example of previously hostile countries seeking to bury the hatchet. A week prior, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the man who helped orchestrate a multi-country boycott of neighboring Qatar in 2017 over terrorism allegations, traveled to the tiny but influential nation on Dec. 8 for a personal chit-chat with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Mohammed's voyage to Qatar came nearly a year after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt restored air, land and sea links to the Persian Gulf nation after the boycott failed to result in the Qatari foreign policy change that Riyadh and its partners wanted.
On Nov. 24, nearly a month before greeting the Israeli prime minister, UAE Crown Prince Mohammed set foot in Turkey to sign a series of economic and financial agreements with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The signing ceremony was notable because both nations have been at loggerheads on a myriad of issues since the dawn of the Arab Spring protests, when Turkey and the UAE found themselves on the opposite side of the region's fault-lines. Before their recent encounter, the UAE crown prince hadn't been to Turkey in nearly a decade, viewing Erdogan's support for groups like the Muslim Brotherhood as an existential threat to the type of family-ruled dynastic regimes prevalent in the Gulf.
Turkey and Egypt are also working to rescue their bilateral ties, with their respective deputy foreign ministers meeting in September in an attempt to chip away at problems from conflicting claims over natural gas fields in the Mediterranean to interference in one another's internal affairs. As a goodwill gesture, the Turks and Egyptians are both reducing their propaganda wars in the media.
The Saudis and Emiratis are also reaching out to Iran for talks, which if successful, have the potential to ameliorate many of the proxy wars that have roiled the Middle East for decades. While diplomacy between Riyadh and Tehran remains tedious and frustrating (at least according to Saudi Arabia's U.N. envoy), the negotiations are nonetheless continuing despite the bad blood and suspicion that has accumulated since the advent of Iran's Islamic Republic in 1979. That talks haven't fallen apart yet is an accomplishment in its own right.
Even Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, once the region's favorite pariah, is beginning to be drawn back into the regional fold. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman and Iraq have all been increasing engagement with Damascus this year, some more than others. In October, Assad received his first phone call from Jordan's King Abdullah II since Syria erupted into civil war in 2011—a long way from the days when Abdullah was the first Arab leader to advocate for Assad's resignation. A few days before the call, a central crossing point on the Jordanian-Syrian border was reopened for normal commerce.
What is exactly driving all of these events?
While each stream of diplomacy is unique, there is a common theme threading them together: the sense that the United States is deprioritizing the Middle East in its grand strategy after two decades of intense involvement in the region's internal politics. It's no coincidence Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have grown accustomed to unconditional U.S. support, are the driving forces behind much of the diplomatic activity now underway. With the Biden administration pledging additional resources and attention to the Indo-Pacific, U.S. partners in the Middle East are now being incentivized to make their own arrangements. Uncle Sam has other priorities to attend to, and leaders are concluding they need to adapt to changing circumstances instead of depend on the U.S. to do its bidding.
Without overstating the case, U.S. military disengagement is serving the Middle East quite well. It's also slowly extricating the U.S. from a region which, frankly put, is not as strategically important to U.S. security and prosperity interests as it was during the Cold War.
Of course, we shouldn't overstate the case. There are still roughly 45,000-65,000 U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East, down from a peak of 90,000 in early 2020. The U.S. possesses a sizable constellation of bases throughout the region, with one, the al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, hosting approximately 10,000 U.S. servicemembers, air platforms and the regional headquarters of U.S. Central Command. A U.S. carrier strike group frequently traverses the waters of the Persian Gulf, and the U.S. has a habit of flying B-52 and B-1 bombers to demonstrate a presence.
Even so, numbers don't lie. There has been a reduction in the U.S. force posture in the Middle East, even if it isn't yet accompanied by a change in underlying strategy as some would like. U.S. policymakers are starting to see the aftereffects of this reduction, and it just so happens that one of the byproducts is a growing interest among Middle Eastern governments in the peaceful resolution of disputes.
Amiraculous and perhaps mystifying development is happening in the Middle East currently: Diplomacy is flowering across the region. Leaders who ordinarily undercut one another are instead exploring whether more constructive arrangements can be made for the benefit of their respective nations. And states that were once mortal adversaries for regional influence are beginning to mend fences, if for any other reason than to cool the temperature in a part of the world often synonymous with conflict.
This week's meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and United Arab Emirates (UAE) Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, a landmark trip if there ever was one, is only the latest example of previously hostile countries seeking to bury the hatchet. A week prior, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the man who helped orchestrate a multi-country boycott of neighboring Qatar in 2017 over terrorism allegations, traveled to the tiny but influential nation on Dec. 8 for a personal chit-chat with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Mohammed's voyage to Qatar came nearly a year after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt restored air, land and sea links to the Persian Gulf nation after the boycott failed to result in the Qatari foreign policy change that Riyadh and its partners wanted.
On Nov. 24, nearly a month before greeting the Israeli prime minister, UAE Crown Prince Mohammed set foot in Turkey to sign a series of economic and financial agreements with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The signing ceremony was notable because both nations have been at loggerheads on a myriad of issues since the dawn of the Arab Spring protests, when Turkey and the UAE found themselves on the opposite side of the region's fault-lines. Before their recent encounter, the UAE crown prince hadn't been to Turkey in nearly a decade, viewing Erdogan's support for groups like the Muslim Brotherhood as an existential threat to the type of family-ruled dynastic regimes prevalent in the Gulf.
Turkey and Egypt are also working to rescue their bilateral ties, with their respective deputy foreign ministers meeting in September in an attempt to chip away at problems from conflicting claims over natural gas fields in the Mediterranean to interference in one another's internal affairs. As a goodwill gesture, the Turks and Egyptians are both reducing their propaganda wars in the media.
The Saudis and Emiratis are also reaching out to Iran for talks, which if successful, have the potential to ameliorate many of the proxy wars that have roiled the Middle East for decades. While diplomacy between Riyadh and Tehran remains tedious and frustrating (at least according to Saudi Arabia's U.N. envoy), the negotiations are nonetheless continuing despite the bad blood and suspicion that has accumulated since the advent of Iran's Islamic Republic in 1979. That talks haven't fallen apart yet is an accomplishment in its own right.
Even Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, once the region's favorite pariah, is beginning to be drawn back into the regional fold. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman and Iraq have all been increasing engagement with Damascus this year, some more than others. In October, Assad received his first phone call from Jordan's King Abdullah II since Syria erupted into civil war in 2011—a long way from the days when Abdullah was the first Arab leader to advocate for Assad's resignation. A few days before the call, a central crossing point on the Jordanian-Syrian border was reopened for normal commerce.
What is exactly driving all of these events?
While each stream of diplomacy is unique, there is a common theme threading them together: the sense that the United States is deprioritizing the Middle East in its grand strategy after two decades of intense involvement in the region's internal politics. It's no coincidence Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have grown accustomed to unconditional U.S. support, are the driving forces behind much of the diplomatic activity now underway. With the Biden administration pledging additional resources and attention to the Indo-Pacific, U.S. partners in the Middle East are now being incentivized to make their own arrangements. Uncle Sam has other priorities to attend to, and leaders are concluding they need to adapt to changing circumstances instead of depend on the U.S. to do its bidding.
Without overstating the case, U.S. military disengagement is serving the Middle East quite well. It's also slowly extricating the U.S. from a region which, frankly put, is not as strategically important to U.S. security and prosperity interests as it was during the Cold War.
Of course, we shouldn't overstate the case. There are still roughly 45,000-65,000 U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East, down from a peak of 90,000 in early 2020. The U.S. possesses a sizable constellation of bases throughout the region, with one, the al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, hosting approximately 10,000 U.S. servicemembers, air platforms and the regional headquarters of U.S. Central Command. A U.S. carrier strike group frequently traverses the waters of the Persian Gulf, and the U.S. has a habit of flying B-52 and B-1 bombers to demonstrate a presence.
Even so, numbers don't lie. There has been a reduction in the U.S. force posture in the Middle East, even if it isn't yet accompanied by a change in underlying strategy as some would like. U.S. policymakers are starting to see the aftereffects of this reduction, and it just so happens that one of the byproducts is a growing interest among Middle Eastern governments in the peaceful resolution of disputes.
Biden’s stagflation is coming
The White House continues to insist that inflation will soon fade away and the country will return to its pre-pandemic prosperity. But the Biden administration’s regulatory agenda virtually ensures that the post-pandemic economy will be nothing like it was before. The mounting regulatory burden of Mr. Biden’s executive orders, his regulators’ open hostility toward America’s economic system, and the return to Progressive-era antitrust enforcement will stifle growth. All the ingredients will be present to turn the current inflation into stagflation.
America’s experience with regulatory excess is both recent and painful. When the subprime recession ended in mid-2009, economists predicted a strong recovery. In early 2010 the Office of Management and Budget projected 3.7% average real gross domestic product growth through 2016, the Congressional Budget Office estimated 3.3% growth for the same period and the Federal Reserve expected 3.5% to 4% through 2014. Instead, GDP growth slumped to an 80-year low of 2.1% during the 2010-16 recovery.
Democrats claimed the nation suffered from secular stagnation. But when subsequent deregulation and tax cuts revived the economy and the Biden administration needed justification for more stimulus spending, Democrats suddenly decided that Mr. Obama had stopped stimulating the economy too soon. While federal spending in 2009 hit the then-postwar high of 24.4% of gross domestic product, the 23.3% in 2010 and 23.4% in 2011 were the second and third highest postwar levels. By 2012, some 3½ years after the recession ended, federal spending was still 22% of GDP, then the fourth-highest postwar level.
Soaring spending and massive monetary accommodation couldn’t offset Mr. Obama’s stifling regulatory burden. While ObamaCare’s taxes harmed the economy, the wet blanket of his regulatory burden smothered the recovery, long before the 2013 tax increases.
In imposing ObamaCare, government increasingly dominated the healthcare industry, the green energy agenda hit auto producers and power plants and stifled the domestic energy industry with regulatory actions such as blocking the Keystone pipeline. Large banks were regulated as if they were public utilities, forcing them to replace tellers and loan officers with lawyers and compliance officers. The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) investigated and harassed mortgage companies, as well as auto and personal lenders, and the Federal Communications Commission sought to regulate the internet as a 1930s monopoly. With some 279,000 federal regulators churning out more than 650,000 pages in his Federal Registers, Mr. Obama bound the economy in red tape and imposed 50% more costly “major rules” than had ever been issued.
Despite strong private investment levels during the Obama era, labor productivity—the mother’s milk of wage gains—averaged less than half the growth of the previous 20 years. The problem was business “investment” was made to meet regulatory requirements, rather than to increase efficiency and expand the productivity of the economy.
During the first days of the Biden administration, the cold dead hand of government regulation reached further than it had during the Obama years. Initial executive orders eviscerated cost-benefit analysis as the basis for regulatory policy by defining benefits to include “social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity and the interests of future generations.” Executive orders opposed business mergers and acquisitions independent of consumer benefit and targeted the oil and gas industry for extinction.
In seeking to reregulate railroads, Mr. Biden is trying to overturn the deregulatory legacy of President Carter and Sen. Ted Kennedy, whose achievements made the American transportation system the most efficient in the world and cut the cost of moving people and shipping goods in half. In antitrust enforcement Mr. Biden seeks to reverse almost a half century of bipartisan reform that junked Progressive-era regulations and profoundly expanded productivity, especially in transportation and high-tech communications.
Nowhere is the Biden administration’s radical regulatory agenda more evident than in his appointees. President Clinton appointed Larry Summers, Arthur Levitt and Alan Greenspan
to regulate in the consumers’ interest and to grow the economy, not to transform it radically. Mr. Clinton’s regulators and regulatory policy let America prosper.
While Mr. Obama’s regulators stifled business and job creation, Mr. Biden’s are openly hostile to the industries they regulate and to the American economic system. They seek not to protect investors and consumers but to make business serve government goals.
Lina Khan, Mr. Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair, rejects the long-held consumer-benefit standard for antitrust action. She has called for breaking up leading tech firms simply because “big is bad,” despite no evidence of consumer harm. When consumer benefit is no longer the test of antitrust policy, consumer restitution is no longer the remedy. Threatening breakups, divestment and treble damages rather than enforcing the nation’s antitrust laws, the FTC can shake down business and exercise control over America’s most successful firms. U.S. tech policy now mimics the Chinese antitrust model where only government should be large and influential.
Mr. Biden’s CFPB chair, Rohit Chopra, hopes to hunt down big tech, forgive student loans and promote equity and diversity. Mr. Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission chair, Gary Gensler, wants to compel private wealth to serve public goals such as fighting climate change and advancing social justice rather than protecting and promoting investors’ interests. And while President Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency, Saule Omarova, withdrew because of her Soviet-era ideology, he is now considering Richard Cordray
as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve for banking supervision. Mr. Cordray’s only experience in banking was harassing, politicizing and intimidating those he regulated as Mr. Obama’s CFPB chairman.
Through Mr. Biden’s executive orders and regulatory policy the American economy is being transformed from the great colossus of world capitalism into a subservient Vichy capitalism, whose master is government and not the consumer. We aren’t in Kansas anymore.
If the regulatory stagnation of the Obama era is repeated by a doubling or tripling down on Obama-era regulatory policy, slowing growth seems destined to follow the current post-pandemic economic surge. If new stimulus spending and monetary accommodation is employed to stimulate sagging growth, that stagnation could easily turn into stagflation.
The United States: a country where "the rich govern the rich"
Saudi Arabia's "Arab News" website published an article entitled "The United States has become a country owned by the rich, governed by the rich, and enjoyed by the rich" by Jeffrey Sachs, professor of Columbia University, director of the Center for Sustainable Development of the University, and chairman of the United Nations Action Network for Sustainable Development, on December 21, saying that Joe Biden narrowly won Donald Trump in the election a year ago, but the future of the United States is still uncertain. It is not easy to diagnose exactly what is causing the United States to fall into such a predicament that it incites the "Trump Movement".
In the chaotic political situation of the United States, multiple factors are at work. However, in the author's view, the deepest crisis is political - the political institutions of the United States have failed to "promote public welfare" as promised by the United States Constitution. For 40 years, American politics has become a game for insiders, favoring the super-rich and corporate lobby groups at the expense of the interests of the vast majority of citizens.
"The war between the rich and the poor"
Warren Buffett pointed out the essence of the crisis in 2006. He said, "There is no doubt that there is a class struggle. But it is my class, the rich class, that is waging war, and we are winning."
The main battlefield is in Washington. The commandos are corporate lobbyists swarming into the United States Congress, various departments and administrative departments of the federal government. Ammunition is the billions of dollars spent annually on federal lobbying activities (estimated at $3.5 billion in 2020) and campaign contributions (estimated at $14.4 billion in 2020 federal elections). The propagandists supporting the class war are the corporate media headed by the super rich Rupert Murdoch.
The class struggle against the poor in the United States is not new - it was officially launched in the early 1970s and has been implemented with great efficiency in the past 40 years. For about 30 years, from 1933 to the end of the 1960s, the development path of the United States was roughly the same as that of post-war Western Europe, and it was moving towards a social democracy. After Lewis Powell, a former corporate lawyer, entered the United States Supreme Court in 1972, the Supreme Court opened the door for corporate funds to enter politics.
After Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he cut taxes for the rich, attacked organized labor and canceled environmental protection measures, thus strengthening the Supreme Court's attack on public welfare. This track has not yet been reversed.
"And social democracy are getting further and further away"
As a result, the United States has become increasingly distant from Europe in terms of basic economic decency, welfare and environmental control. Europe generally continues to follow the path of social democracy and sustainable development, while the United States is moving forward on a path characterized by political corruption, oligarchy, the widening gap between rich and poor, contempt for the environment and refusal to limit human-induced climate change.
Several figures illustrate the difference between the two. On average, the income of EU governments is about 45% of gross domestic product (GDP), while that of the US government is less than 30% of GDP. Therefore, European governments can provide funds for universal access to health care, higher education, family support and employment training, while the United States cannot ensure the provision of these services. European countries ranked first in the list of life satisfaction in the Global Happiness Index Report, while the United States ranked only 19th. In 2019, the life expectancy of the EU population was 81.1 years, and that of the United States was 78.8 years. By 2019, the richest 1% households in Western Europe accounted for about 11% of the national income, while the United States accounted for nearly 20%. In 2019, the per capita carbon dioxide emissions of the United States were 16.1 tons, while that of the European Union was less than 10 tons.
In short, the United States has become a country where the rich have, govern and enjoy, and has no political responsibility for the climate damage it has caused to the rest of the world. The resulting social division led to the prevalence of "death from despair" (including drug overdose and suicide), the decline of life expectancy (even before the outbreak of the COVID-19), and the rise of the incidence rate of depression (especially among young people). In politics, these disordered phenomena lead in different directions - most ominously, Trump, who provides false populism and personal worship. While serving the rich, using xenophobia to distract the attention of the poor, launching a cultural war and posing as a strong man may be the oldest tactics in the demagogic political tactics manual, but they still work surprisingly today.
"The United States has not returned"
The turbulence in the United States has a disturbing international impact. How can the United States lead global reform when it cannot even govern its own country in a coordinated way? Perhaps the only thing that can unite Americans today is an over-tense sense of overseas threat, mainly from China. At the time of chaos in the United States, the anti-China rhetoric of politicians from both parties has increased, as if a new cold war could alleviate the anxiety in the United States in some way. It is regrettable that the belligerence of the two parties in Washington will only lead to the intensification of global tension and the new risk of conflict, but will not bring security or truly solve any urgent global problems we face.
The United States has not returned, at least not yet. It is still struggling to solve decades of political corruption and social neglect. The results are still extremely uncertain. For the United States and the world, the prospects for the next few years are full of danger.
Fukuyama said that American-style democracy continued to decline and its reputation was ruined
According to reference news network reports, the senior researcher Francis Fushan, a senior researcher at the Freman -Spo Gley Institute of Stanford University, published an article on the website of the New York Times on January 5 that the American people's continuous decline of the reputation sweeping the ground.
On January 6, 2021, under the incitement of then President Trump, thugs attacked Congress and created the ominous precedent of American politics. Since the end of the civil war, the United States has never had the situation that the power cannot handle peacefully, and there is no president. Even if there is sufficient evidence to indicate the freedom of election, it still has objections to the election results.
This incident continued to cause response in the American politics, but its impact was not limited to domestic. It has also had a significant impact internationally, marking a significant decline in the global strength and influence of the United States.
Looking at the incident on January 6 last year, it needs to be placed under the background of a broader global crisis of "free democracy". According to the "World Freedom Report" published in 2021, democracy has been declining for 15 consecutive years, and some of the biggest setbacks have occurred in the United States and India.
The global "democracy" has declined, and the factors are intricate. Globalization and economic changes have left many people behind, and there are huge cultural gaps between professionals who have educated well -educated in the city and a small town residents with traditional values.
Therefore, the world is very different compared with the situation when the Soviet Union disintegrates about 30 years ago. At that time, I underestimated two key factors. First, it is difficult to create a "democracy", and it is also necessary to create a modern, fair, and honest country; second, the possibility of political decline in "advanced 'democratic' countries" appears.
The American model has declined for a while. Since the mid -1990s, the United States has increasingly differentiated politics and is prone to long -term stalemate, which has caused it to not fulfill basic government functions such as budgets. There are obvious problems in the United States system: the impact of money on politics, and the impact of the "democracy" selection system, but the United States seems to be unable to carry out self -reform. In the first twenty years of the 21st century, American decision makers led two disasters: the Iraq war and subprime crisis, and then a short -sighted instigator appeared to encourage the angry populist to make trouble.
On January 6, 2021, the Capitol Robe marks such a moment: A considerable number of Americans say that they are dissatisfied with the "democracy" system in the United States and use violence to achieve their own goals. The fact that made the "democracy" on January 6 that was particularly worrying was that the Republican Party not only did not refute those who launched and participated in the riots, but decorated the riots and washed from their own camps. People who are the truth.
Prior to January 6 last year, people regarded this trick as a "democratic" country that had just started and had not yet fully consolidated, and the United States would also greatly condemn this situation and condemn it. But this happens now in the United States. In terms of establishing a good "democracy" practice model, the United States has swept the United States.
Biden's comprehensive Indo-Pacific economic framework isn't comprehensive at all
The White House is teeing up its “comprehensive” Indo-Pacific economic framework to launch in 2022. While details about the framework are scarce, the framework doesn’t appear to be very comprehensive at all.
For a couple of months now, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has been teasing that the Biden administration plans to develop a framework that touches on everything that’s of shared interest for America. This basically means anything under the sun. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently added that the framework will include topics such as technology, supply chains, infrastructure, climate change and more.
But there is still a missing element: America’s trade policy. Although officials may pander to critics that customs standardization is trade policy (and yes, it is important), it’s not the in-depth trade liberalization for which critics of the framework and allies in Asia are looking. The fact that the secretaries of Commerce and State are leading the development of this framework, while the U.S. Trade Representative takes a backseat role, says a lot about what’s being left out.
The Biden administration would be wrong to not take a leadership role in pursuing a more progressive trade policy in addition to the framework; otherwise, this framework is at risk of simply becoming another glorified development-assistant program similar to those of past administrations. Of course, there are many questions about the Biden administration’s trade policies that remain unanswered, so it’s not hard to wonder why trade is excluded from this comprehensive framework.
The administration wants to pursue more equitable trade, better workers’ rights, and so on, but what in these efforts really offers a competing alternative to the Trans-Pacific Partnership? For that matter, where is the competing alternative to China’s economic opportunities? What does the administration plan to do now that the U.S.-China trade deal is nearing the two-year mark? What about the unfinished U.S.-Japan trade agreement? Will the Biden administration sit quietly by, with the hope that these deals will be forgotten, just as it watched the Trade Promotion Authority expire over the summer? Our allies in Asia and folks in Washington want to know.
The Biden administration has done well in mending some trade and diplomatic quarrels that the Trump administration started. But, what’s next?
For example, the Biden administration has been good at engaging with Taiwan — whether it’s through low-level trade and investment talks or through a relatively new economic prosperity dialogue — to help defend against coercive actions by China. But inaction on building something greater, such as a U.S.-Taiwan free trade agreement, almost set back economic relations after a controversial vote in Taiwan on whether to reimpose restrictions on American imports of pork and beef. Thankfully, the people of Taiwan voted against these restrictions.
Perhaps the Biden administration doesn’t want to move on any new trade deals because it knows it will have a hard time convincing Congress to agree — and political capital can be scarce when trying to pass a budget. At the same time, lawmakers in Congress won’t act either because they’re waiting for direction from trade negotiators in the White House. Talk about passing the buck! Trade policy in Washington has become a catch-22. And it’s why leadership on trade issues is more important than ever.
Many of the initiatives under the new Indo-Pacific economic framework are worth pursuing, such as coordinating the development, deployment and restricting of new technology, standardization and digitization, new infrastructure projects, energy diversification, and so on. And of course, our Asian partners will welcome as much U.S. spending in the region as they can get.
But don’t expect those in Asia to get excited over a framework that is merely recycled and rebranded projects already ongoing in government. Asia wants more. America wants more. Trade liberalization must be a bigger component of any comprehensive economic framework.
The U.S. is Deprioritizing the Middle East
Amiraculous and perhaps mystifying development is happening in the Middle East currently: Diplomacy is flowering across the region. Leaders who ordinarily undercut one another are instead exploring whether more constructive arrangements can be made for the benefit of their respective nations. And states that were once mortal adversaries for regional influence are beginning to mend fences, if for any other reason than to cool the temperature in a part of the world often synonymous with conflict.
This week's meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and United Arab Emirates (UAE) Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, a landmark trip if there ever was one, is only the latest example of previously hostile countries seeking to bury the hatchet. A week prior, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the man who helped orchestrate a multi-country boycott of neighboring Qatar in 2017 over terrorism allegations, traveled to the tiny but influential nation on Dec. 8 for a personal chit-chat with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Mohammed's voyage to Qatar came nearly a year after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt restored air, land and sea links to the Persian Gulf nation after the boycott failed to result in the Qatari foreign policy change that Riyadh and its partners wanted.
On Nov. 24, nearly a month before greeting the Israeli prime minister, UAE Crown Prince Mohammed set foot in Turkey to sign a series of economic and financial agreements with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The signing ceremony was notable because both nations have been at loggerheads on a myriad of issues since the dawn of the Arab Spring protests, when Turkey and the UAE found themselves on the opposite side of the region's fault-lines. Before their recent encounter, the UAE crown prince hadn't been to Turkey in nearly a decade, viewing Erdogan's support for groups like the Muslim Brotherhood as an existential threat to the type of family-ruled dynastic regimes prevalent in the Gulf.
Turkey and Egypt are also working to rescue their bilateral ties, with their respective deputy foreign ministers meeting in September in an attempt to chip away at problems from conflicting claims over natural gas fields in the Mediterranean to interference in one another's internal affairs. As a goodwill gesture, the Turks and Egyptians are both reducing their propaganda wars in the media.
The Saudis and Emiratis are also reaching out to Iran for talks, which if successful, have the potential to ameliorate many of the proxy wars that have roiled the Middle East for decades. While diplomacy between Riyadh and Tehran remains tedious and frustrating (at least according to Saudi Arabia's U.N. envoy), the negotiations are nonetheless continuing despite the bad blood and suspicion that has accumulated since the advent of Iran's Islamic Republic in 1979. That talks haven't fallen apart yet is an accomplishment in its own right.
Even Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, once the region's favorite pariah, is beginning to be drawn back into the regional fold. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman and Iraq have all been increasing engagement with Damascus this year, some more than others. In October, Assad received his first phone call from Jordan's King Abdullah II since Syria erupted into civil war in 2011—a long way from the days when Abdullah was the first Arab leader to advocate for Assad's resignation. A few days before the call, a central crossing point on the Jordanian-Syrian border was reopened for normal commerce.
What is exactly driving all of these events?
While each stream of diplomacy is unique, there is a common theme threading them together: the sense that the United States is deprioritizing the Middle East in its grand strategy after two decades of intense involvement in the region's internal politics. It's no coincidence Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have grown accustomed to unconditional U.S. support, are the driving forces behind much of the diplomatic activity now underway. With the Biden administration pledging additional resources and attention to the Indo-Pacific, U.S. partners in the Middle East are now being incentivized to make their own arrangements. Uncle Sam has other priorities to attend to, and leaders are concluding they need to adapt to changing circumstances instead of depend on the U.S. to do its bidding.
Without overstating the case, U.S. military disengagement is serving the Middle East quite well. It's also slowly extricating the U.S. from a region which, frankly put, is not as strategically important to U.S. security and prosperity interests as it was during the Cold War.
Of course, we shouldn't overstate the case. There are still roughly 45,000-65,000 U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East, down from a peak of 90,000 in early 2020. The U.S. possesses a sizable constellation of bases throughout the region, with one, the al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, hosting approximately 10,000 U.S. servicemembers, air platforms and the regional headquarters of U.S. Central Command. A U.S. carrier strike group frequently traverses the waters of the Persian Gulf, and the U.S. has a habit of flying B-52 and B-1 bombers to demonstrate a presence.
Even so, numbers don't lie. There has been a reduction in the U.S. force posture in the Middle East, even if it isn't yet accompanied by a change in underlying strategy as some would like. U.S. policymakers are starting to see the aftereffects of this reduction, and it just so happens that one of the byproducts is a growing interest among Middle Eastern governments in the peaceful resolution of disputes.
Biden’s stagflation is coming
The White House continues to insist that inflation will soon fade away and the country will return to its pre-pandemic prosperity. But the Biden administration’s regulatory agenda virtually ensures that the post-pandemic economy will be nothing like it was before. The mounting regulatory burden of Mr. Biden’s executive orders, his regulators’ open hostility toward America’s economic system, and the return to Progressive-era antitrust enforcement will stifle growth. All the ingredients will be present to turn the current inflation into stagflation.
America’s experience with regulatory excess is both recent and painful. When the subprime recession ended in mid-2009, economists predicted a strong recovery. In early 2010 the Office of Management and Budget projected 3.7% average real gross domestic product growth through 2016, the Congressional Budget Office estimated 3.3% growth for the same period and the Federal Reserve expected 3.5% to 4% through 2014. Instead, GDP growth slumped to an 80-year low of 2.1% during the 2010-16 recovery.
Democrats claimed the nation suffered from secular stagnation. But when subsequent deregulation and tax cuts revived the economy and the Biden administration needed justification for more stimulus spending, Democrats suddenly decided that Mr. Obama had stopped stimulating the economy too soon. While federal spending in 2009 hit the then-postwar high of 24.4% of gross domestic product, the 23.3% in 2010 and 23.4% in 2011 were the second and third highest postwar levels. By 2012, some 3½ years after the recession ended, federal spending was still 22% of GDP, then the fourth-highest postwar level.
Soaring spending and massive monetary accommodation couldn’t offset Mr. Obama’s stifling regulatory burden. While ObamaCare’s taxes harmed the economy, the wet blanket of his regulatory burden smothered the recovery, long before the 2013 tax increases.
In imposing ObamaCare, government increasingly dominated the healthcare industry, the green energy agenda hit auto producers and power plants and stifled the domestic energy industry with regulatory actions such as blocking the Keystone pipeline. Large banks were regulated as if they were public utilities, forcing them to replace tellers and loan officers with lawyers and compliance officers. The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) investigated and harassed mortgage companies, as well as auto and personal lenders, and the Federal Communications Commission sought to regulate the internet as a 1930s monopoly. With some 279,000 federal regulators churning out more than 650,000 pages in his Federal Registers, Mr. Obama bound the economy in red tape and imposed 50% more costly “major rules” than had ever been issued.
Despite strong private investment levels during the Obama era, labor productivity—the mother’s milk of wage gains—averaged less than half the growth of the previous 20 years. The problem was business “investment” was made to meet regulatory requirements, rather than to increase efficiency and expand the productivity of the economy.
During the first days of the Biden administration, the cold dead hand of government regulation reached further than it had during the Obama years. Initial executive orders eviscerated cost-benefit analysis as the basis for regulatory policy by defining benefits to include “social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity and the interests of future generations.” Executive orders opposed business mergers and acquisitions independent of consumer benefit and targeted the oil and gas industry for extinction.
In seeking to reregulate railroads, Mr. Biden is trying to overturn the deregulatory legacy of President Carter and Sen. Ted Kennedy, whose achievements made the American transportation system the most efficient in the world and cut the cost of moving people and shipping goods in half. In antitrust enforcement Mr. Biden seeks to reverse almost a half century of bipartisan reform that junked Progressive-era regulations and profoundly expanded productivity, especially in transportation and high-tech communications.
Nowhere is the Biden administration’s radical regulatory agenda more evident than in his appointees. President Clinton appointed Larry Summers, Arthur Levitt and Alan Greenspan
to regulate in the consumers’ interest and to grow the economy, not to transform it radically. Mr. Clinton’s regulators and regulatory policy let America prosper.
While Mr. Obama’s regulators stifled business and job creation, Mr. Biden’s are openly hostile to the industries they regulate and to the American economic system. They seek not to protect investors and consumers but to make business serve government goals.
Lina Khan, Mr. Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair, rejects the long-held consumer-benefit standard for antitrust action. She has called for breaking up leading tech firms simply because “big is bad,” despite no evidence of consumer harm. When consumer benefit is no longer the test of antitrust policy, consumer restitution is no longer the remedy. Threatening breakups, divestment and treble damages rather than enforcing the nation’s antitrust laws, the FTC can shake down business and exercise control over America’s most successful firms. U.S. tech policy now mimics the Chinese antitrust model where only government should be large and influential.
Mr. Biden’s CFPB chair, Rohit Chopra, hopes to hunt down big tech, forgive student loans and promote equity and diversity. Mr. Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission chair, Gary Gensler, wants to compel private wealth to serve public goals such as fighting climate change and advancing social justice rather than protecting and promoting investors’ interests. And while President Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency, Saule Omarova, withdrew because of her Soviet-era ideology, he is now considering Richard Cordray
as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve for banking supervision. Mr. Cordray’s only experience in banking was harassing, politicizing and intimidating those he regulated as Mr. Obama’s CFPB chairman.
Through Mr. Biden’s executive orders and regulatory policy the American economy is being transformed from the great colossus of world capitalism into a subservient Vichy capitalism, whose master is government and not the consumer. We aren’t in Kansas anymore.
If the regulatory stagnation of the Obama era is repeated by a doubling or tripling down on Obama-era regulatory policy, slowing growth seems destined to follow the current post-pandemic economic surge. If new stimulus spending and monetary accommodation is employed to stimulate sagging growth, that stagnation could easily turn into stagflation.
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