This is the time of
monsters»
Antonio Gramsci
I would like to present you with a very substantive, common-sense analysis of the current geopolitical situation, which correlates directly with the ideas and proposals made in the book "How to Get rid of the shackles of totalitarianism. The challenge of overcoming political innocence" https://www.amazon.com/HOW-GET-RID-SHACKLES-TOTALITARIANISM-ebook/
As well as demonstrating the impartiality of the author's vision of the world, give confidence in the relevance of the problems raised here and the vital need to solve them in today's situation. Also gives the sense that I'm not alone in my life position and beliefs though.
Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the
“Jabloko” party, from positions of humanism (however, the specifics of Russia's
position must not be forgotten either!) not only defines and specifies the
causes of the crisis in modern civilisation, but formulates and offers real
solutions to overcome the crisis. Their constructive evaluation and thoughtful
implementation in life can now become a guarantor of the survival of modern
civilisation and a prerequisite for human progress established in humanism.
The question
remains open: do the able-bodied people, and above all the political leaders of
the democracies, perceive, and yet will be able to take adequate action to
prevent the sinister apocalypse of the world order?!!
(The original Article can
be read at https://www.yavlinsky.ru/article/titanic/
https://www.facebook.com/reel/571874555599855
The accents made in the
Article are mine.
FECI, QUOD POTUI, FACIANT MELIORA POTENTES
POLITICAL
GAP
On the Dangers and Challenges of the Approaching Era
Grigory Yavlinsky
23.12.2024.
And
it's the most dangerous and challenging historical moment to find a path to a positive outlook. At the
end of 2024, for the first time in many
decades, we realistically ended up on the
brink of a large- scale military clash using, if not nuclear weapons
(even though it is entirely possible),
then by its destructiveness - comparable to them. Escalation progresses and
takes effect almost daily. These are no abstract threats, no bluff, no
blackmail. In fact, the risks are very high in the assessment of
professional experts (1).
There
are virtually no effective deterrent international structures, institutions,
instruments left in global policy. After decades of operation by the United
Nations (UN), the UN Security Council,
the OSCE is losing its former role. The issue of setting up new institutions or reforming existing ones at a
high political level is not even seriously discussed, there is a lack of
understanding of fastmoving objective processes. The world is in a geopolitical
vacuum, with no working international political institutions, no deterrence
agreements, no effective diplomacy. And it comes at a time when civilization is
under threat from deadly dangerous weapons and the military conflict with the
direct and indirect involvement of nuclear powers is in a hot phase.
We
didn't end up in one moment in that situation. The processes that led to this
began around 35 years ago, demonstrating
themselves in shocking events. These were shocks for Russia, which had a huge impact on people's
consciousness and perceptions: The collapse of the Soviet Union, which
erupted after failed economic and
political reforms of the 1990 s, a
bloody war in Chechnya.
Changes
in Russia, the severe economic situation and the deep political crisis led to a temporary weakening
of Moscow's positions on the
world stage, which undeniably influenced
American political mentality - the US became the leader of the single
polar world for a while. Unitary, as was thought at the time, not only because
of one country's apparent economic and military superiority over all others,
but also because of its dominance in choosing landmarks on the way to a freer,
fairer, more democratic and safer world for all of us. But how did the world's
elite take advantage of open opportunities?
After
the end of the cold War and the abandonment of the arms race, huge sums freed
up in the Western economy that needed to be channelled towards the development
of socalled third world nations - education, healthcare, business development.
But instead, the billions saved were invested in financial pyramids. The result
didn't take long to wait: the rapidly growing divide between the rich west and
poor third world countries became one of the main preconditions for the
terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September 2001. The follow-up was the failed
American military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Sirijs. The United
States has not achieved what it wants in these operations and has thrown these
regions into chaos. Moreover, in the 1990 s, the funds invested in
financial pyramids dissolved in history
during the biggest economic crisis of 2007-2008. The consequences of this
crisis have been catastrophic and are
still being felt in many parts of the world.
All
these major upheavals of the past three and a half decades have become one of the factors
behind global change. The peculiarity of
the situation, however, is that in those same
years, in the absence of positive qualitative changes in the global situation, significant
qualitative shifts of a different
nature began to develop - completely unexpected and with virtually unpredictable consequences.
Populism
has always been, to a greater or lesser extent, part of political life. However, modern
populism is special in world politics.
Its qualitative difference from previous marginal forms is that modern
populism has become an almost
absolute political dominance, expressing and enforcing ochlocracy, which in turn forms and
strengthens in the mentally informative space through digital technologies, the
internet, social networks. Such political populism accepts qualitatively different shapes and scales than before.
As
you know, ochlocracy (literally mob domination) is the decline of
democracy, to the point of indulgence the immediate desires of the masses. It's
the emotions and passions that prevail
over the mind, it's a general lack of understanding of reality and an inability
to adequately assess the threat. In today's circumstances it
is this trend that prevails, and in practice is realised through political populism.
Let's call it ochlopopulism.
Since
social networks turned from popular internet activity into a global social
phenomenon in the late 2000 s, the internet crowd has taken on a dominant
role in politics. Human values,
national interests, understanding of the global and regional perspective all stopped being a
determining factor in
political decisionmaking. Politicians-ohlopopulists are now
guided by sentiments on social networks, indulging in an absurd and often
selfish logic of internet communities. Moreover, the influence and role of once authoritative
world class traditional media continues to fall. While outward ochlopopulists tend to conform to the
sentiments and preferences built on social networks, in reality they often
pursue the interests of narrow, closed and principled anti-democratic groups.
And thus there is an esential crash of
democracy, with its external visibility and form still remaining for now.
Today's digital technologies give populists virtually limitless opportunities.
The world is sinking into chaos.
It's
not hard to notice that the world's leading politicians, especially in western countries, are
discussing anything in the context of
the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and arguing their observations with anything, but only not from the position of preserving
human life the main value in that discourse is far from number one.
The
consequences of flushing human values away from politics and the growing divide with
reality are obvious: in the end, populists
are unable to live up to their unrealistic promises to voters, and in an effort to justify their
failures are beginning to engage in a search for enemies - internal or
external. So domestic politics
puts basic stone to authoritarianism, totalitarianism to fascism.
And in foreign policy, as we well
know, looking for enemies is the way to war.
The
crucial instrumental practical role in the ambitious political implementation of the ochlocracy,
namely meeting mob aspirations and
domineering ambitions in a populist way
leading to illegality and violence and domination, belongs to the
internet and social networks. The basis for the flow of information is now based on
emotions and opinions that
dominate the internet, not actual events. The current filing and hierarchy of reports no longer works: a
blogger diletent rating with a million
subscribers proves more influential than a scientist-expert analysis and
arguments. Prejudice is seen as the norm these days. Reports of facts
without prejudicial interpretation of
them are generally irrelevant. This leads to a parallel flow of
information that is only formally linked to reality. “This opens up huge
opportunities to manipulate the information agenda and through it politics to
purposefully achieve an ambitious
redistribution of economic but also, in
perspective, political power,”
I wrote about it in my article, “The ochlocracy of information” (2), as early
as 2020.
These
tendencies are particularly vivid in American politics. On socnetworking's role in
the US presidential election in 2016, 2020 and 2024, it says and writes a jot:
manipulating public opinion through
social networks blamed both Democrats and Republicans. But there are other
examples. Thus, in December
2024, Romania's Constitutional Court annulled the results of the country's presidential
election because one of the candidates
used “aggressive propaganda during the pre-election campaign, over exploiting
the algorithms of social networking platforms” and thus disinfecting Romanian voters (3). The
court argued that the candidate manipulated voter votes through digital
technology and artificial intelligence.
The growing danger these days is that the ochlocracy, through new information and digital
technologies, leads to the power of
populists and selfish manipulators, who
will eventually turn the absolute majority of citizens into some kind of modern slaves.
And it's far from an exaggeration, nor a
fantastic scenario of a distant future.
The
information chaos opens up broad perspectives for manipulating people's consciousness and
opinion: modern technology, by its
capabilities and
consequences, has long outperformed
classic censorship of
print editions and proved far more
effective than the usual propaganda-based “brainwashing.”
And really, you don't need to flush your
brain anymor human consciousness now forms through socnets.
For
a long time, there was the illusion that the internet was an alternative to
traditional television, that access to vast amounts of information resources
without obvious restrictions of
censorship would contribute to the development of independence of thought. Only
now comes the recognition that this vision
is misguided. Perhaps in an attempt to reverse dangerous trends, most recently the
Australian Parliament took the decision
to ban access to social networks for children and adolescents under 16 (4). However, a
direct ban is unlikely to be effective, plus, the open question is what to do
with misleading those over 16?!
Remarkably,
in early December 2024, the Oxford
University publishing house named brain ROT- as the name of the year in the English speaking world. The
publishing house says the word has become particularly popular on social
networks in the past year and is firmly
used in the lexicon of bloggers (5).
Such
a combination of words probably best describes what's happening in the heads of not
just socnet rank and file users, but internet-crowd-focused politicians -
populists.
The
tendency to push high quality news media out of the information field has been
intensifying in the world for several years. Replacing news with mass user generated
informational messages is no longer an independent phenomenon: media audiences
and socnetworks deliberately extort news content from their platforms (in
Canada, for example, Facebook and Instagram are absolutely officially blocking
links to posts).
Research
into trends in the information space today shows that, at a time when audiences
are increasingly tired of political news and making choices in favor of
entertainment content, the flow of information continues to grow rapidly and is
virtually no longer structured and formatted. The Economist's recent assessment
confirms that there will be a dominance of opinion over facts in the
information stream over the next four years. Moreover, the more extreme the
direction these views will take, the better they will spread. Neither existing
media platforms nor current political leaders (6) will likely be able to cope
with this flow anymore. Already today,
we can watch ochlopopulism
become one of the causes of political crises in Germany, France, South
Korea. The dangers of ochlopopulism are reminded to us of the dramatic
consequences of four year old Brexit in Britain.
In
the future, we are expected to see even more complex and unpredictable phenomena associated with
the introduction of artificial
intelligence - AI (7) into public political reality. But even that's not all yet! For now, a
hypothetical but already developed
artificial superintelligence (ASI) era is coming - a system with intellectual capabilities
that transcends human ones and is
able to generate ideas that go far beyond anything humans can do or even imagine. A
particular issue today, therefore,
is how to overcome the chaos of intrusive internet networks, how to preserve
democratic politics, how to cut
it off from ochlocracy and populism, i.e. from hysterical form and
inherently inadequate mob demands. This
should become a key challenge in building a new global facility. This
task should not be postponed for longer. Because it may miss a moment when you can still
realistically change the deadlocked, destructive course and save civilization
from chaos.
And
the chaos is already there. The global turmoil of the late-21 st century,
combined with modern digital technologies, has led to the globalisation of
political entropy and disorder. The
world has entered an era of ochlocracy and aggressive
political populism, lost sight of the
future in the shape of the concept of
human development.
The
situation in the world is increasingly reminiscent of the eve of the 1914
disaster, when politicians and large state elites, without wanting war in
principle, moved ever closer to it and came to a global military conflict with
the participation of 38 countries in which the deaths occurred, by various estimates, 15 to 22 million people
(8). It should be noted that even
then, at the beginning of the 19 th century, humanity underwent a strong
technological revolution: a phone, a telegraph, planes, internal combustion
engines, cars, principled new types of armaments (chemical weapons) appeared.
All of this overshadowed the
real danger and threat that was one of the
decisive factors for the launch of the absurd world war (as a result, including the coup d' état in
Russia in 1917). Today, too, as 110 years ago, new inventions and modern
technologies, ahead of human
consciousness, energize negative emotions in
humans and once again lead humanity to the development of very dangerous events.
A
post war European installation based on human rights and the priority of human
life has actually become obsolete and is no
longer the basis and central point of modern politics. The
Russia-Ukraine conflict overshadowed the apparent socio-political crisis in the
European Union. This irresistibly leads to serious economic and social problems
and therefore contributes to the strengthening of radical forces both right wing
and left-wing in many European countries.
REPRESENTATIVE
OF THE ERA - DONALD TRUMP
Donald
Trump won a convincing victory in the US presidential election. Thanks to the
peculiarities of his character, the specific manners of his behavior and the
experience of an aggressive American businessman, Tramp, better than no
other, realizes populism in politics at the highest level in its contemporary
appearance, expressing the will of the crowd, the ohlusa, or, as they sometimes say, the “ordinary people.”
Because
what does Tramp's promise? Faster satisfaction of the interests of the least
deprived sections of the population: tax
cuts, significant deregulation (a reduction in public oversight in the private business), a trade tariff raising
customs duties on importers (including
importers from the EU) to 10-20% (almost 60% for Chinese goods), mass
deportation of illegal migrants, abandoning the climate change agenda. All
focusing instead on energy and mining (using hydraulic fracturing technology to
intensify extraction). What steps
specifically Tramp will take to deliver on all those promises is unclear
for now. Just as there are no answers to
questions to do about such a policy with
a dramatic increase in public debt and a critically increasing budget deficit.
But agiotage is already very noticeable
in markets and the press.
On
Tramp foreign policy guided by both what the President elect himself and his
close circle have said over the past four
years and what was published on the political media, it can be said that
American foreign policy will be based on a simple principle: The US will only guard its
national interests and only look after security threats in North America.
Washington no longer needs to be
responsible for maintaining the order of the
broad world, nor does it need to engage in a fight with countries that
do not directly threaten the United States itself (regardless of the dangers and threats these countries
bring to their regions).
Under
Tramp's foreign policy doctrine, the US is determined to maintain unparalleled
military strength, but only to defend itself. Americans are no longer going to
the risks of a military clash with Russia, either because of Ukraine or the
Baltic States. Nor does the US need a confrontation with China because of
Taiwan. Why should the Pentagon protect against the Hussites in the Red Sea
China's trade with Europe?! For whom does Washington have any alliances with
Europeans or Asians?! Let Eurasians deal with Eurasia! Trampe is counting on
the geographic isolation of the United States, his nuclear arsenal, his ability
to control parts of the North Pacific and Atlantic to keep potential
aggressors away. The Tramp's concept
also seeks to diminish the importance of international law and the role of
already virtually non working international organizations such as the UN, the
UN Security Council, the WTO, etc. It will be an attempt to weaken the
restrictions the legal and institutional ones that the “liberal order of the
world” imposes on American power. Tramp believes that this will reduce
Washington's confrontation with Beijing,
with Moscow and even with Tehran, because then violations of these international
norms can be ignored. Likewise, one can no longer worry about the fate of
democracy in some small countries
thousands of kilometres beyond America's
borders.
However,
in the event of a strong political interest Tramp may also make exceptions in
his foreign policy. Already during his first term as President, the US
facilitated the conclusion of the
Abraham Treaty, a Treaty to normalise Israel's relations with the UAE,
Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. Similarly, during Trampe's tenure through the US,
Serbia and Kosovo agreed to normalize
economic relations, while Egypt, along with Persijs Gulf States, settled
the conflict with Qatar. In addition, in February 2020, the United States
struck a peace deal with the Taliban that essentially allowed the deaths
of Americans in hostilities in
Afghanistan to be prevented in the last year of the Tramp's administration's rule.
Still,
the peacekeeper's mission is far from central to Tramp. Of course, if there are
any peace initiatives for councillors, then
why not realise them. But here, when it comes to trade issues and
economic interests, then any friction and conflict is: for example, when China
threatens Taiwan's semiconductor industry - the world's largest chip maker, on
which the U.S. economy also depends. Or if US citizens fall victim to Iranian
attacks in these cases, Tramp also ready to act
thousands of kilometres off the US coast.
But
in general America First, i.e.“America is above everything” is the
defining direction in Donald Trump's politics. And it must be understood that
this will have disruptive consequences for global stability in the future. World
history, especially until 1945, leaves virtually no hope that the current
global political crisis will peacefully settle itself. Moreover, compared
to its competitors, the United States is far less powerful now than it was in
1945 or even 1991.
The
modern world machine can collapse at a shocking rate. The US's abandonment of
protecting the global economy will only reinforce mercantilism and
protectionism. All that was seen as the norm in recent decades - free trade,
unhindered passage of continents and oceans, the inadmissibility of conquering
other countries - it will all turn out to be a thing of the past. The
peculiarity and tragedy of Tramp's isolationist conception - which is
essentially the product of a political ochlocracy that has emerged in the US -
is that such policies only yield the desired fruit in the short term. In time,
Americans will be forced to regret their choice of “America is above everything.”
Yes, chaos and anarchy will come first to other countries, but sooner or later
global catastrophic change will also come down to the US. Still, analysts
around Tramp are responding to it roughly as one of the characters in Mikhail
Sholochov's novel “Silent Don” put it - “die You Tonight, I Tomorrow!”
That
Tramp's first term is not a coincidence, a departure from the usual norm, but
the formation of a new norm the same ochlopopulism - was understandable,
if not in 2016, then already in 2020 certainly. And after Joe Biden's coming to
power had to seek a solution to the problem. However, the new worrying trends
in US politics were never so identified, and Trampe's defeat in last election
turned into his triumphal victory on November 5, 2024.
I
wrote about these dangerous phenomena in the November 2020 publication
“Trampe's victory”: «… the Internet and new digital technologies, along with
the deformity of political competition, have led to the fact that the quality
and professionalism of politicians as statesmen is no longer decisive. Policy
requires organization, implementation and enforcement control. In fact, it also
needs managers - competent, energetic, orderly and adequately motivated.
But today we're seeing a very different picture... the real point of this
election is not that Tramp has lost, but Democrats have won. The point is that
a weak and untalented politician has suffered defeat while his party has
significantly strengthened its positions in every other branch of power. And
it's the perfect situation for an able bodied far right nationalist - a
populist who will run for President in 2024..." (9). And two months later,
in January 2021, in an article “Put Your
House in Order,” I pointed out that Tramp has succeeded in making the point:
'He has shifted the frames and prepared the next coming to power of the
autocrat and populist in the US... and in this situation it is important not to
go wrong. In the near term, populism will arm itself with respect strategies to
look solemn, not marginal, and thus be a prospective political direction. This
populism would turn away from those of its followers who are vulgar putting
their feet on the table of the Speaker of the US House of representatives of
Congress. We will witness how populism, along with the collapse of
institutions, will become an alternative “modern development trend...” (10)
Tramp's
victory in the 2016 election and his presence in power during the first term
has, by its very nature, allowed many moral and professional restrictions in
politics to be removed, not just for supporters of the Republican leader but
for his opponents. Populist manipulative techniques are firmly entrenched in
big politics, the substantive agenda of the day has gone to the fore, giving
space for external forms and effective statements. A stark example is the
much repeated and endlessly debated Republican candidate's pledge during the
pre election campaign to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. And Tramp
return to the White House is just one aspect of the victory of ochlopopulism
(imperious political populism) as the dominant vector in world politics.
To
repeat, it's not simply about some unique personality, it's about modern
information technology creating the conditions for a sustained presence in
power by far right populists, nationalists, iselessists prone to authoritarian
methods of leadership and manipulation of mass consciousness. It is a
prolonged multi-factor crisis in the global political system (see page
“Political Entropy” (11) and “The New World Mess” (12).
The distinctive feature of this crisis is the overall shift in
politics towards populism and the principled abandonment of the human centric
content of politics. It's important to note that Trump has
already gone far beyond the boundaries of Republican supporters in the US. A
month before the election, the Economist published an article titled “Trampling
American Politics” (13). The newspaper pointed out that the Democratic and
Republican candidate's pre election programs differ little with each other, and
that Tramp “transformed American politics by his image and likeness.”
But indeed, before the election, Tramp vowed to bomb Mexico and deport
illegals, called opposition politicians “internal enemies” and claimed migrants
were “poisoning blood” of the nation. And despite all this - or perhaps even
thanks to it, Tramp won nearly 50% of the electoral vote. So it comes out
that all these slogans and appeals are no longer just a marginal position, but
actually the views of half the US population in the 21 st century.
Perhaps
particularly influential in U.S. domestic and foreign policy will now be a
group of business billionaires technocrats from silicon Valley. First, it's
about figures like the all known Ilona Musk and the lesser known Peter Thiel,
cofounder of PayPal and Palantir (A U.S. data analysis software developer
company whose main principals are military structures and special services -
such as the Pentagon and the CIA, investment banks and hedge funds). And if
Musk's role in Trampe's victory is quite direct - the SpaceX founder has spent
$277 million on the Republican last campaign (14), then Thiel's participation
wasn't as trivial: U.S. Vice President elect Jei di Vance found himself in that
position thanks largely to Thiel's advancement. And it's with Vance, rather
than simply with Tramp, that they associate their long term plans with
technocrats billionaires who have cracked down on big politics. Their main
future bet is artificial intelligence (AI), but their whole ideology, for the
most part, is that human value and social problems no longer matter much. That
the country, as a democratic institute in contemporary realities, is
low-performing and merely stifles technical progress by trying to regulate AI
and hindering the development of the cryptocurrency industry. According to
technocrats - billionaires, the state should be managed as a business company.
They believe digital technologies combined with authoritarian administration
will solve all problems (15).
Judging
by Tramp's nominated personalities after his election, his government will
be made up entirely of people obedient
to him and dependent on himones
who will only say yes on all issues and in all cases. According to
authoritative Western media, “Tramp's return proclaims a new golden age of
money in US politics and diplomacy” and
that, apparently, “he is about to start with the billionaire cabinet.” (16)
The
result of this election is not just Tramp personal merit, not just an
individual phenomenon. Tramp return is another important testament to the end
of the post war world machine era and the result of the rise of a global
disorder and political entropy. Trend,
symbolized by Tramp, is gaining victory in many countries around the world.
Therefore, this phenomenon should not be narrowed down to “trampism.” Tramp is
neither the creator nor ideologue of this political direction, he has only been
adept at “saddling the wave” and has become the brightest and most
powerful representative of ochlocratic populism in world politics.
Incidentally, even if he had lost in the
last election, the trend would surely continue
to grow in both the US and the world.
OCHLOPOPULISM
- A CELEBRATION ON “TITANIC”
A
stark demonstration of the inability of world politicians to understand and
confront today's challenges is the now increasingly obvious tragic
political and diplomatic impasse in which all parties involved, one way or
another, in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have found themselves.
The political diplomatic
impasse is different from the military. The military deadlock reflects the objective position of
opposing forces given their potential capabilities. While the political
diplomatic impasse is the
consequence of reducing the level of professionalism in global
politics and diplomacy, abandoning
fundamental values and guiding principles.
Modern
politicians work in the context of overarching populism and therefore often
find themselves at a dead end: they are unable to understand and correctly
assess the perspective.
Extremely sad, but no wonder they were never able to see a window of opportunity to stop the
bloodshed that opened between
autumn 2022 and winter 2023. Now known politologist Ivan Krastev out in his
recent publication the Financial Times: “the special operation failed in
September 2022. What we have been seeing since then is a proxy war against NATO
taking place on Ukrainian
soil." (17) Right. Just what price has been paid for these past two years and what
else lies ahead?!
Somehow nobody talks about it at all.
I've
been talking about the threat of a direct Russian clash with NATO on Ukrainian
soil as early as summer 2021 (see “It will
be a war not with Ukraine but with the entire Western world” (18). But that was not what Russia or the
West wanted to hear then. It wasn't
until late 2021 that some in Europe and America began to realize just how real
the threat of a military conflict was,
but in Russia's so-called opposition environment, it was also unable to
understand anything until the start of the special military operation.
In
November 2022, my letter on the need for a ceasefire agreement and a window of
opportunity opened to it was passed through the Vatican Embassy in Moscow to
Pope Francis of Rome. But neither
could his voice be heard. On the other hand, in early February 2023, “Novaya
Gazeta” was published as a call to stop the fire (19). Even then, however,
virtually no one understood everyone expected a fictional “battlefield win.”
And the moment was missed. For more than a thousand days now, the world's
leading politicians have been deliberately abandoning any business like
diplomatic attempt to stop the deaths of people and the destruction of an
entire country. This is one of the key mistakes
throughout Western diplomacy and very much in the Bayden administration
as well.
To
repeat, the state of such things in global politics is defined not so much by
the personal qualities of individual decision makers as by piecemeal and
gradual, but perhaps irreversible, decay of the country and even the most
important spheres of activity of society as a whole. And that's then the
consequence of losing the value guide and replacing it thanks to socnets, with
cynical post-modernist populism.
At
the same time, it is also one of the main reasons for a consistent deepening of the Middle
East crisis. Israel continues the war
because neither the international bodies (UN), the US, the European Union, nor the powerful Arab
States, either individually or
together, can only put into practice, but can't even offer any clear long term plan
for ensuring security in theory. There is a deep and growing gap between
declarations and even decisions taken at UN level and the possibility of
implementing them in today's circumstances.
Such
a global machine is a world of political entropy and chaos, namely the collapse
and disorganization of global social and political processes. For example, for
Russia, with its vast
territory and shrinking population, such a world is particularly dangerous. And it has to resist. But
overcoming political entropy will require principled new solutions. While as
time goes on, there is less and less
reason to expect American and European
political systems to cope successfully with a crisis of increasing
magnitude. It is very likely that at current political trends, the example of the Western model of prosperity
will no longer be workable in countries
such as Russia. Political processes in the West, as well as Western politicians
themselves, are increasingly distancing themselves from the role models of
democratic and liberal values,
generally from mainstream human values.
Understanding
these threats, coupled with the real concern for the future, suggests that you
will have to count first and
foremost on your own forces, not only within your own country but also
in international relations. The main crisis of our era is not so much in geopolitical confrontation as
in seamless, but in an ever increasing
loss of human values and meaning in global politics, coupled with a lack of
understanding of the problem. That's the essence of what's going on!
Neither economic success nor strengthening military capabilities outweigh the
deficit of these ideas. During this time, the area of political primary responsibility is to
move towards key meaningful meanings,
values and goals such as saving people's lives, ensuring their freedom, dignity and realizing
opportunities for growth.
It
is important to emphasise and historical experience
shows that in politics, if we miss the moment, the real opportunities to change things are lost for a very long
time, and in some cases forever. And
humanity has to pay dearly for it.
The
post-1945 global facility is in deep crisis. It looks like the departure of this previous model is already
irreversible. The peculiarity of modern global change is that current
politicians in charge of decision-making do not have an adequate understanding
of what is happening, nor any promising view of the outlook. This determines
the occurrence and further expansion of chaos.
Increasingly,
the observed penchant for adapting to current conditions can be compared to the
desire of “Titanic” passengers to find a more comfortable cabin on board,
indelibly approaching a
catastrophic collision with the iceberg. So, for example, the prevailing thrill of Tramp's
shocking return to the White House,
ignoring the meaning of this cambec context, is like a triumph on “Titanic.” Because
overall, what's happening, including
Trampe's victory, is a process that threatens an ambitious but perhaps towering
defeat for all the ship's
passengers, no matter what class of cabins they have.
There
should be no hope of finding a comfortable and safe place in the current
circumstances. It is necessary to do something different – to start
designing, constructing and harmonising high quality new international security
systems as quickly as possible, and at the same time to build new national
institutions in principle. Both must be built
on fundamental values of humanism, which can be called European, Christian
or mainstream human.
I
am convinced that the most important thing for the future is the identification, understanding and acceptance by
all the system of universal human values as a common central guide for the
development of a multipolar world, as well as a firm commitment to
institutionalize these values.
That
is to say, the establishment of a programme for the practical implementation of values,
including the entire system of international and national public bodies and
institutes.
Fundamentally
and very importantly, all of this is realistically
protected (which is a big but not yet solved task) from the distorting
effects of the latest digital technologies and rapidly developing artificial
intelligence.
In other words, there must be a readiness to implement reforms that will ensure that new technologies, the country itself, with its institutes and, in general, the entire world facility, serve the human being, not the other way around.
President Biden’s farewell
address to the nation
Whether you like him or not, what is true is that we are becoming an
oligarchy and democracy is beginning to fade before our very eyes. One of the
problems in comment sections like this, is if people hear an opinion they dont
like, rather than acknowledging there are people behind them that live
different lives with different perspectives, they say, "oh, lots of bots
and smooth brains".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0FEi8Jh5KI
We are witnessing a very sad moment in American history
The President of the United
States is aligning himself with the dictator of Russia, Vladimir Putin, to
undermine the independence of Ukraine and its democracy. Here are my thoughts: https://x.com/SenSanders/status/1892379144186392725
President Macron: Russia is already aggressive towards the whole of
Europe.
“It's started, it's intensified. It's putting North Korean soldiers on
European soil. It's got a very strong army, it's attacking us on information,
cyber, migration. And I can mention other things. It's destabilizing us, it's
attacking our interests in Africa, it's provoking us, testing us at sea and in
the air."
https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1892877374481461545
"Ukraine started the war" lies Andrei Kelin, Russian ambassador in the UK and laughs.
When says it's a lie and
asks why he's laughing, Kelin says - you listen but do not hear. Russians want
history textbooks to be written by Russian propagandists. https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1892617101254267091
Mr. President: Putin is THE dictator and 10 Ukraine-Russia war truths we
ignore at our peril
Feb. 20, 2025
This has been a dizzying and disorienting week in international
diplomacy. One with wild implications for Ukraine, the future
of America’s standing in the world and President Trump’s legacy.
Trump is absolutely right in wanting to end the bloodshed in Ukraine.
The suffering
has been appalling and the stalemate brutal. But in the furious mix of
wild opinions this week from the White House down, there are at least 10 truths
that every American voter must hang onto.
In Trump’s rush to end the bloodshed, these are also the truths against
which any deal will be judged and which will define him when the history books
are written.
To ignore them or not treat them with the gravity they deserve will also
have enormous consequences for decades to come:
Truth No. 1
Vladimir Putin started this war, despite what Trump said days ago.
In February 2022, following a massive buildup on Ukraine’s borders,
Putin’s army launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. There is no rational
narrative outside of Russian propaganda that blames “aggressive” actions by
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky or NATO that can justify such a military
action. This came after Putin had already seized Crimea in 2014 and launched a
war in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine.
And that doesn’t include the other wars he started, like that against
the tiny nation of Georgia in 2008.
Trump is absolutely right that the war “never had to start.” I believe
it is true that it wouldn’t have started if he had been in the Oval Office. But
it was Putin, not Zelensky, who started the war.
Truth No. 2
Russia is fighting for conquest. The Russian Federation invaded Ukraine
in 2022. Whatever you think of the country or its leadership, Ukraine is an
internationally recognized, sovereign nation. Putin invaded in the hope of
devouring the country wholesale. By contrast, Ukraine has absolutely no
territorial ambitions in Russia.
And remember the brutality of Russia’s actions. Among the multitude of
depravities and war crimes committed by Putin’s army has been the abduction
of some 20,000 Ukrainian children. Who wants to live in a world where
the strong can simply devour the weak, and kidnap little children by the
thousands? Why hasn’t the US put their release at the top of the list of its
negotiating demands?
Truth No. 3
Ukraine is fighting for its independence. Most Ukrainians do not want to
be part of Russia. They do not want to be governed from Moscow. The vast
majority want to live in an independent, sovereign country in control of its
own future.
Truth No. 4
Ukrainians are not Russians. Ukrainians and Russians are not “one people
— a single whole,” as Putin wrote in a 2021 essay. He is also simply lying in
his assertion that “modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era.”
Ukrainians and Russians are two separate ethnic groups. They speak
different languages and have distinct histories.
Truth No. 5
Putin is a dictator. Putin has ruled Russia with an iron KGB fist since
coming to power in 1999. He has ruthlessly quashed independent media, ended
free and fair elections, crushed civil society and killed his political
opponents. And not just inside Russia, but around the world. People who live
inside Russia and express any opposition to the war are imprisoned.
Truth No. 6
Zelensky
is not a dictator. A political outsider, Zelensky won the 2019 presidential
election, which was relatively free and fair. He has a 57% approval rating, not
the 4% Trump claimed.
Unlike in Russia, Ukraine has vibrant independent media that hold the
government to account — despite claims to the contrary by internet swamp
creatures and Russian bots.
Trump risks repeating Biden’s Afghanistan disaster by appeasing
Putin
Many Ukrainians freely criticize the government’s conduct of the war.
When Britain was fighting for its survival against the Nazis in the 1940s, it
too did not hold elections.
The Russian ambassador to the UK spent yesterday crowing that he’s “not
sure” Zelensky would be re-elected if there were elections today. But we all
know one thing for sure. Whether or not Zelensky would be re-elected in
Ukraine, Putin will always be re-elected in Russia. Because his elections are
con jobs, pageant shows. Putin hasn’t won a free and fair election in his life.
Because he doesn’t hold them.
Truth No. 7
Russia is not a friend of the US. It is a hostile, nuclear-armed state
that resents American power and the world the US has built. It has ever closer
relations with China, Iran and North Korea. In fact, all of its main friends
are countries that are the biggest foes of America.
Truth No. 8
Ukraine is a friend of the US. Ukraine wants to be part of the
American-led order. Its people and government are deeply pro-American. Since
the start of the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian men and women I have seen
fighting at the front lines are fighting the Russian military to protect their
loved ones and their country. They also do it in the knowledge that if they
fail, other countries will be next.
Truth No. 9
Putin cannot be trusted. This isn’t just a statement of fact. It is also
something that 81% of American voters agree on.
Putin has invaded multiple countries in violation of every international
treaty. He has interfered in multiple elections in his nearest neighbors. He
has violated international agreements, including the INF Treaty with the US.
He has lied to American presidents and European leaders his whole
career. He has lied to Trump even since Trump has been back in office. Most
recently Putin promised that he wouldn’t target Ukrainian energy facilities.
Yet just this week he carried out a massive missile and drone attack
against multiple energy facilities in Ukraine. It is almost as though Putin’s
word doesn’t count for very much and he doesn’t care if you know it.
Truth No. 10
American aid to Ukraine is not being wasted.
Nobody would argue that Ukraine is a country without corruption. But
that does not mean its people and sovereignty should not be protected.
We should also remember which country in this war is truly corrupt.
Russia is one vast, kleptocratic state, led by Putin and a small cartel of
oligarchs who have made themselves among the richest people on Earth. All while
keeping most of the Russian population in a state of poverty that would not be
believed by most of us in the West.
Putin and his cronies have been accumulating power and wealth all their
careers. And they will torture and kill anyone who exposes this corruption.
Remember his political opponent Alexey Navalny and the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky?
It is easy to expose corruption in Ukraine. But in Russia, it is deadly.
Besides, according to the Department of Defense, some $58 billion out of
the $183 billion in Ukraine aid has been spent in America. It is
money that has benefited American workers and industries.
The war has also degraded the military of one of the despotic regimes in
the world and reduced its threat to not just Europe but America without one US
soldier being killed. It has also sent a strong deterrent message to China,
Iran and North Korea not to try the same.
You can criticize Zelensky, complain. But we should be under no
illusions about who started this fire and who the true dictator or villain of
this tragic tale is.
Trump has a chance to bring an end to this war, to stop the killing.
Maybe even win a Nobel Peace Prize.
But he will not be honored if the peace is an appeasement, one that bows
down in the face of evil as it denies obvious truths.
The judgment of history will be even harsher — decades of peace and
prosperity in Europe and America thrown away to a resurgent Russia harassing
the East. Without a strong peace, it won’t be just Ukraine that suffers. It is
all of us.
That is the ultimate truth.
How Europe must
respond as Trump and Putin smash the post-war order
The region has had
its bleakest week since the fall of the Iron Curtain. The implications have yet
to sink in
Feb 20th 2025
The PAST week has been the bleakest in Europe since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Ukraine is being sold out, Russia is being rehabilitated and, under Donald Trump, America can no longer be counted on to come to Europe’s aid in wartime. The implications for Europe’s security are grave, but they have yet to sink in to the continent’s leaders and people. The old world needs a crash course on how to wield hard power in a lawless era, or it will fall victim to the new world disorder….: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/02/20/how-europe-must-respond-as-trump-and-putin-smash-the-post-war-order
Trump Has Reeled in More Than $200 Million Since Election Day
The president-elect has boasted about the donations for his
inauguration, library and political activities from those seeking favor or
perhaps in some cases, atonement.
By Kenneth P.
VogelMaggie Haberman and Theodore Schleifer
Kenneth P. Vogel covers lobbying and influence, Maggie Haberman covers
the White House and Theodore Schleifer covers wealthy donors.
Jan. 4, 2025
Since his victory in November, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s allies
have raised well over $200 million for a constellation of groups that will fund
his inauguration, his political operation and eventually his presidential
library, according to four people involved in the fund-raising.
It is a staggering sum that underscores efforts by donors and corporate
interests to curry favor with Mr. Trump ahead of a second presidential term
after a number of business leaders denounced him following the violence by his
supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Mr. Trump has promised to gut the “deep state” and made various promises
to industry supporters. Among the pledged donors for the inaugural events are
Pfizer, OpenAI, Amazon and Meta, along with cryptocurrency firms.
The total haul for the committee financing his inaugural festivities —
at least $150 million raised, with more expected — will eclipse the
record-setting $107 million raised for his 2017 inauguration, according to
three people briefed on the matter who requested anonymity because they were
not authorized to share internal financial information.
Other committees benefiting from the fund-raising blitz include a super
PAC called Make America Great Again Inc. and its associated nonprofit group,
which is expected to be used by Mr. Trump’s team to back his agenda and
candidates who support it, while opposing dissenters.
Mr. Trump has boasted about the haul, telling people during the
Christmas holiday season that he had raised more than $200 million since the
election. Mr. Trump’s team has repeatedly noted how many people have wanted to
find ways to donate to him since his election win.
The Trump transition and inaugural committee did not return emails
seeking comment about the fund-raising haul.
David Tamasi, a lobbyist who has raised money for Mr. Trump, dismissed a
suggestion that corporate interests were giving to avoid Mr. Trump’s wrath,
though he acknowledged that some donors may be trying to atone for having
previously maintained distance from the president-elect.
“It is a time-honored D.C. tradition that corporations are
enthusiastically embracing this cycle in all manners, largely because they were
on the sidelines during previous Trump cycles,” he said. “They no longer have
to hedge their political bets.”
The more than $200 million raised will benefit a constellation of groups
that will fund Mr. Trump’s inauguration, his political operation and eventually
his presidential library, according to four people involved in the
fund-raising.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times
Inaugural committees can accept unlimited contributions from individuals
and corporations, but not foreign nationals. Major corporations that try to
avoid partisan politics have long donated to inaugural funds to signal a
willingness to work with new administrations and support for the democratic
transfer of power, regardless of the incoming president’s party.
But there is cross-pollination among top fund-raisers for Mr. Trump’s
inauguration and his political efforts, including several partners at lobbying
firms that represent major corporate interests. Raising money for the
inauguration can help lobbyists secure access for clients, and cachet for
themselves with the incoming administration.
Among the four finance chairs for Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee are
the lobbyist Jeff Miller and Reince Priebus, a former chief of staff in the
Trump White House who is not a lobbyist but is chairman of the board of
advisers of the lobbying firm Michael Best Strategies. Their firms represent
companies with much at stake in the forthcoming administration, some of which
plan to donate to the inauguration.
Mr. Miller’s firm, Miller Strategies, represents Pfizer and the
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, each of which has pledged
donations. Their executives met after the election at Mar-a-Lago with Mr. Trump
and his choice for health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
amid concerns
about how the drug industry might be affected by Mr. Kennedy, a
vaccine skeptic.
Since the election, Mr. Miller’s firm has registered to lobby for the
ride-share tech company Uber, which has donated $1 million, as has, separately, its
chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi. The firm also represents the tech
company OpenAI, whose chief executive, Sam
Altman, plans to give $1 million. Michael Best Strategies has represented the cryptocurrency firm Ripple for nearly
four years. It has pledged $5 million in its own cryptocurrency, XRP — among
the largest known donations to the inaugural committee.
After the election, Ripple retained the lobbyist Brian Ballard, a top
Trump fund-raiser.
Another Ballard client, Robinhood, a leading cryptocurrency trading
platform, has donated $2 million.
“We look forward to working with President Trump and the incoming
administration to drive positive change in the markets, be an active voice for
customers and pursue our mission to democratize finance for all,” Mary
Elizabeth Taylor, Robinhood’s vice president of global government and external
affairs, said in a statement.
Other companies associated with cryptocurrency are expected to be major
contributors as well, reflecting optimism that Mr. Trump will deliver on his
campaign trail promises to dial
back federal scrutiny that figures in the industry say have stifled
its growth.
Amazon, a Ballard client that found itself crosswise with the first
Trump administration, said it planned
to donate $1 million in cash.
Donations of at least $1 million grant access to the top
package of perks related to several days of festivities in the run-up
to the inauguration on Jan. 20, including what are touted as “intimate” dinners
with Mr. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance, though often with many
attendees, as well as black-tie balls after the swearing-in.
Other entities, ranging from companies like Meta to previous Trump
critics like the billionaire Ken Griffin, have made $1 million donations to the
inaugural.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, speaks at the DealBook Summit in New
York in November. Amazon plans to donate $1 million in cash to the inaugural.Credit...Jeenah
Moon for The New York Times
Contributions to inaugural committees, which are required to be publicly
disclosed to the Federal Election Commission months after the inauguration, are
one of the last major opportunities to financially support a second-term
president.
Mr. Tamasi and Oswaldo Palomo, who are partners in the lobbying firm
Chartwell Strategy Group, raised more than $3 million for the inaugural. Their
firm represents companies that could be affected by Mr. Trump’s proposed
tariffs, including the South Korean automaker Hyundai and a U.S. subsidiary of
the South Korean conglomerate SK Group.
The deadline for donating to the inaugural to be eligible for the perks
of the weekend is Jan. 10, according to documents distributed to potential
donors.
If the inaugural committee’s fund-raising exceeds the amount budgeted
for the festivities, the expectation among fund-raisers is that the excess
would be transferred to the committee collecting money toward a presidential
library for Mr. Trump after he leaves office, according to two people involved
in the effort.
The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund Inc. was incorporated in
Florida on Dec. 20, six days after it was revealed that ABC News had agreed to
donate $15 million to Mr. Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum
to settle
a defamation claim he had brought against the network.
The fund was incorporated by a lawyer in Florida, Jacob Roth, who has
previously created Trump groups, including the inaugural committee, according
to state corporate records. The purpose of the entity, according to the Florida
articles of incorporation, is “to preserve and steward the legacy of President
Donald J. Trump and his presidency.”
Kenneth P. Vogel is
based in Washington and investigates the intersection of money, politics and
influence. More about
Kenneth P. Vogel
Maggie Haberman is
a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign,
down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former
President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
Theodore
Schleifer is a Times reporter covering campaign finance and the
influence of billionaires in American politics. More about Theodore
Schleifer
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/04/us/politics/trump-inaugural-donations.html
Democratic rebuttal takes aim at Musk
Senator
Elissa Slotkin in Wyandotte, Michigan, U.S. March 4, 2025.
In the Democratic
rebuttal to Trump's speech, Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin directed some of
her sharpest criticism at Trump adviser Elon Musk:
"While we’re
on the subject of Elon Musk, is there anyone in America who is comfortable with
him and his gang of 20-year-olds using their own computer servers to poke
through your tax returns, your health information, and your bank accounts? No
oversight. No protections against cyber-attack. No guardrails on what they do
with your private data," she said.
"We need more efficient government. You
want to cut waste, I’ll help you do it. But change doesn’t need to be
chaotic or make us less safe. The mindless firing of people who work to
protect our nuclear weapons, keep our planes from crashing, and conduct the
research that finds the cure for cancer — only to re-hire them two days later?
No CEO in America could do that without being summarily fired," Slotkin added. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/donald-trump/trumps-address-congress-ukraine-immigration-plans-expected-2025-03-05/
Trump, Justice and Retribution
Investigating Trump, Project 2025 and the future of the United States |
Four Corners
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3jqALQgBzw
US ‘destroying world order’
06.03.2025
Ukraine’s
ambassador to the UK, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, has accused the US of “destroying the
world order”.
In a speech at
Chatham House, he also warned that Nato could cease to exist and Russia will
come for Europe next.
“It is not just
the axis of evil trying to revise the world order … The US is destroying the
world order,” he said. “It is obvious the White House has questioned the unity
of the whole western world. And now Washington is trying to delegate the
security issues to Europe without the participation of the US.”
Zaluzhnyi, a
former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, has been tipped as a
future replacement for President Zelensky. https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/trump-us-zelensky-deal-aid-uk-latest-news-sb3kc7pnb
Trump’s message
to Congress: This is a presidency by billionaires, for billionaires
03-05-2025
In his speech to
Congress, the president laid out plans to enrich corporations and deep-pocketed
individuals, from DOGE’s cuts to the new ‘gold card.’
BY Jay Willis6 minute read
Forty-three days
after taking office for the second time, President Donald Trump delivered a
joint address to Congress on Tuesday, in the same chamber that an angry mob of
his supporters ransacked four years earlier in an attempt to overthrow the
government. Like most Trump speeches of late, this one was a lengthy, rambling
affair that clocked in as the longest-ever joint address to Congress by a
healthy margin. Many Democratic lawmakers elected not to attend at all, and
several who did show left well before Trump wrapped for the night. Apparently,
one can only spend so much off-the-clock time in the same room as a euphoric,
seal-clapping Lauren Boebert before deciding to try and beat traffic instead.
The speech’s
substance will be familiar to anyone who has seen clips of a Trump rally over
the past 10 years: a jumble of unhinged culture-war screeds and inscrutable
conspiracy theories, sprinkled with the occasional gesture toward making
America great that prompts the sycophants to pop out of their chairs like
reactionary jack-in-the-boxes. But to a greater extent than most joint
addresses to Congress, which newly elected presidents typically use to preview
their loftiest aspirations, this felt more like a victory lap from a lame-duck
president who sees his victory as a license to plunder
the country as much as the law allows, and sometimes beyond it. If
Tuesday’s agenda is any indication, for the next four years, Trump’s plan for
governing is to make every decision based on how much he thinks he and his
cronies stand to profit from it.
Trump of course
spent a considerable amount of airtime touting the accomplishments of the
Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s ambitious project to make the
entire federal government as buggy and nonfunctional as Twitter became shortly
after he purchased the site. DOGE has already uncovered “hundreds of billions
of dollars of fraud,” said Trump, who rattled off examples of foreign
aid expenditures he wants to scuttle in the jeering cadence of a
comedian who knows his audience does not need to hear the punchline to
understand the racist joke. “$8 million to promote LGBTQI+ in the African
nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of,” he said at one point,
soaking in the laughter that followed.
Later, Trump
highlighted his and Musk’s ongoing efforts to gut the federal agencies charged
with implementing the laws Congress passes. “For nearly 100 years, the federal
bureaucracy has grown until it has crushed our freedoms, ballooned our
deficits, and held back America’s potential in every possible way.” he said.
“The nation founded by pioneers and risk-takers now drowns under millions and
millions of pages of regulations and debt.” In order to “unshackle our
economy,” Trump promised that under his leadership, the executive branch would
eliminate ten existing regulations for every new one it creates, building on
his first-term record of “ending unnecessary rules and regulations like no
other president had done before.”
Set aside, for a
moment, the fact that seemingly every time Musk and the DOGE teens announce
some new source of cost savings, their estimates turn out to be wrong by
an order
of magnitude at least. Grousing about purportedly frivolous
expenditures and onerous regulations are time-honored
traditions among wealthy conservatives, whose definition of “wasteful”
government spending includes all government spending that does not redound
directly to their benefit. Musk and Trump want to cut foreign aid because they
want the government to do fewer things that require their tax dollars, and know
that in a Republican Party animated by bigotry and xenophobia, humanitarian
assistance for developing countries makes for an easy political target. And by
kneecapping agencies’ ability to do the day-to-day work of governing, Trump and
Musk would ensure that deep-pocketed corporations relentlessly chasing
shareholder value are free to abuse and exploit consumers without fear of
meaningful consequences.
The balance of
Trump’s speech continued in this same vein: He framed his second-term tax
agenda as offering “cuts for everybody,” which glosses over the fact that,
according to a Wharton School analysis,
the top 10% of earners would receive about 56% of the proposed cuts’ value. He
reiterated his pledge to “take back” the Panama Canal, presumably to the
delight of billionaire investor Larry Fink, whose firm, BlackRock, just bought key
ports on either side of it.
When discussing
tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China, and probably more countries to be named soon,
Trump promised to “take in trillions and trillions of dollars and create jobs
like we have never seen before,” ignoring the reality that the real-world
burdens will fall first on farmers who
can’t sell crops and working
people paying more for cars, cell phones, and t-shirts. In the two
days after Trump announced that
his tariffs would take effect, the Dow fell some
1300 points, which Trump characterized as “a little disturbance”—but, he added,
“We’re okay with that.” I am not sure the millions of normal people whose
retirement savings the president is staking on a harebrained trade war are
quite as sanguine.
Last August, Trump
held a press conference surrounded by foodstuffs in which he promised to
“immediately” bring down prices—“starting on day one,” he added as if to clear
up any ambiguity. Yet his speech only occasionally referenced what some two-thirds of
voters describe as a “very big problem”; when he did bring it up, it was mostly
by framing DOGE’s scorched-earth approach to governance as a cure-all for
everything ailing the country, from spiking egg prices to the high cost of
vehicle financing. “By slashing all of the fraud, waste, and theft we can find,
we will defeat inflation, bring down mortgage rates, lower car payments and
grocery prices, protect our seniors, and put more money in the pockets of
American families,” he said after a lengthy riff about alleged rampant Social
Security fraud. Again, for everyone whose weekly bills have not plummeted since
Trump took office, I do not think “just trust Elon Musk” will be an especially
persuasive message.
Perhaps the most
oafishly venal policy Trump discussed on Tuesday was his idea for
a “gold card,” which would extend green card-style privileges and an easy path
to citizenship to foreign nationals willing to pay a $5 million fee. “We will
allow the most successful job-creating people from all over the world to buy a
path to U.S. citizenship,” he said, promising that the cards would go “on sale
soon,” as if he were a late-night TV pitchman trying to get you to buy a
wearable blanket with cat ears affixed to the hood. For all the scorn that
Trump displays for immigrants fleeing violence and poverty in their home
countries, he is happy to extend the benefit of the doubt to anyone with the
means to write a seven-figure check.
Here's why business leaders are spending big on Trump’s inaugural
committee
Some of the planned donations reportedly include $1 million
each from Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Facebook
parent company Meta.
Dec. 24, 2024,
By Kevin Breuninger, CNBC
Top CEOs and their companies are pledging to donate millions of dollars
to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural committee, as they seek to get on
his good side and make inroads before he takes office.
Some of the planned donations reportedly include $1 million each from Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, OpenAI CEO
Sam Altman and Facebook parent company Meta, led by Mark Zuckerberg.
Others include $2 million from Robinhood Markets and $1 million each from both Uber and its
CEO, Dara
Khosrowshahi.
Ford is reportedly coupling its own $1 million donation with a
fleet of vehicles.
Hedge fund manager Ken Griffin also said he plans to give $1 million to
the tax-exempt inaugural committee, Bloomberg reported. Other donations from finance leaders
are reportedly in the works.
Empowered by a decisive electoral victory, Trump has vowed to revamp
U.S. economic policy in a way that could have outsized benefits for a few
favored industries, like fossil fuels.
At the same time, he has telegraphed the value, both personal and
political, that he places on face-to-face meetings and public praise from chief
executives of the world’s largest companies.
“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump wrote Thursday in a post
on Truth Social, the social media app run by his own tech company.
Many of those CEOs have already made, or are planning to make, trips to
Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, resort and de facto transition
headquarters, as they seek to gain influence with and access to the incoming
administration.
To that end, Trump’s inaugural committee presents a “unique
opportunity,” said Brendan Glavin, director of research for the
money-in-politics nonprofit OpenSecrets, in an interview.
Inaugural committees, which are appointed by presidents-elect, plan and
fund most of the pomp and circumstance that traditionally surrounds the
transition of power from one administration to the next.
While the money is ultimately benefiting a recent political candidate,
it doesn’t carry the same connotation as a donation to, say, a super PAC, which
can fund partisan political activities that risk stoking controversy.
And unlike a direct contribution to a candidate’s campaign, there are no
limits on how much an individual — or a corporation or labor group — can give
to an inaugural committee.
Moreover, since Trump already won the election, an inaugural
contribution carries no risk for a high-profile executive of backing a losing
candidate.
“It really is a great opportunity for them to curry favor with the
incoming administration,” Glavin said.
While it’s nothing new for corporations and power brokers to shower big
money on inaugural committees, experts told CNBC the Trump factor changes the
calculus.
“It’s all heightened now,” Glavin said. “None of these people, they
don’t want to be Trump’s punching bag for four years.”
Trump’s inaugural committee and his transition team did not respond to
requests for comment.
Record hauls
Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee raked in about $107 million, by far the
most of any in U.S. history. The previous record had been set in 2009 during
the first inauguration of Barack Obama, whose committee raised $53 million.
Trump’s second inauguration is on pace to shatter that record, with
pledged contributions already surpassing a $150 million fundraising goal, ABC News reported.
President Joe
Biden’s inaugural committee, by comparison, raised nearly $62 million.
“One of the oldest adages in Washington is that if you’re not at the
table, you’re on the menu, and the price of admission to have a seat at the
table keeps going up,” said Michael Beckel, research director of Issue One, a
political reform advocacy group.
The boost in funding for Trump’s second inaugural committee comes in
part from tech giants, many of whom largely steered clear of supporting his
first inauguration.
Journalist describes Trump's movements as a 'regime change' towards
authoritarianism
February 19, 2025
The Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum says President
Trump's dismantling of the U.S. civil service system, and his attacks on judges
and his opponents, are part of a playbook on undermining democracy.
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. "There's A Term For What Musk
And Trump Are Doing" (ph). That's the headline of the latest Atlantic
magazine article by my guest, Anne Applebaum. The term, she says, is regime
change. She writes, "no one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase
because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long
desired." She points out during his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump spoke of
Election Day as Liberation Day, a moment when people he described as vermin and
radical left lunatics would be eliminated from public life.
Before Applebaum started writing about America moving to the right and
Trump moving toward authoritarianism, she was writing about how some European
countries were becoming authoritarian. Last weekend, she was at the Munich
Security Conference where Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Pete
Hegseth were dismissive of NATO and its importance for American as well as
European security, marking a turning point in the post-World War II alliance.
It left European leaders shocked and worried.
Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic. She's also a senior fellow
at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the School of
Advanced International Studies. Her latest book is "Autocracy, Inc.: The
Dictators Who Want To Run The World." Her other books include
"Twilight Of Democracy," "Red Famine: Stalin's War On
Ukraine" and "Gulag: A History," which won the Pulitzer Prize
for general nonfiction. She's a former Washington Post columnist and member of
the editorial board. We recorded our interview yesterday morning.
Anne Applebaum, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
ANNE APPLEBAUM: Thanks for having me.
GROSS: You're calling what's happening in the U.S. under the Trump
regime, regime change. Can you expand on why you're using that language? In the
past, you've used words like illiberal democracy or authoritarianism. The
description keeps getting more extreme.
APPLEBAUM: I think it's very important to understand that DOGE, the
Department of Government Efficiency, is not primarily interested in efficiency.
If it were, it wouldn't have encouraged mass resignations in the civil service,
nor is it primarily interested in transparency or accountability or better
government. If it were interested in those things, it wouldn't be firing random
people. It wouldn't be searching to get control of data for unclear purposes.
It wouldn't be dissolving whole departments.
What DOGE is interested in is something that I've seen happen in other
countries. What it's doing is altering the nature and values of the American
federal civil service. What Trump and people around him have been calling for
for a long time is a new kind of politics in America and a new kind of
government. And now what we see is them carrying out that desire.
GROSS: I want to talk about that more in-depth. But first, I want to
talk about what happened over the weekend at the Munich Security Conference,
which you attended to report on. So let's talk about how shocked European
leaders were by what JD Vance and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth had to say
about NATO and about Europe's far right, and how shocked they were at how the
U.S. has sidelined Europe and even Ukraine from the initial negotiations with
Russia about ending the war in Ukraine. Hegseth said that European allies
should increase military spending and decrease their reliance on Washington and
that Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker.
Vance said, if NATO wants us to continue supporting them, and NATO wants
us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance, why don't
you respect American values and respect free speech? You have a lot of contacts
in Europe. I mean, your husband is the foreign minister of Poland. You live
part-time in Poland and part-time in the U.S. in Washington. What did you hear
behind the scenes about the reaction of European leaders to what American
leaders said about NATO?
APPLEBAUM: Funny enough, what was important about Vance's speech was
actually that he did not speak about NATO. So it's very important to understand
the context. He was talking to a large room filled with defense ministers,
four-star generals, ex-security analysts, people who care about things like the
fiberoptic cables that lie under the Baltic Sea that Russian ships have
recently been cutting. These are people who have real world serious concerns.
They think about war and peace. They think about the possibility of Russia
invading their countries.
Vance got up in that room in front of those people who were expecting
him to talk to address those concerns and instead changed the subject to
culture wars. And he gave a whole speech, which was almost something that, you
know, a Russian propagandist could have given, sort of describing incidents and
situations, many of which - some of which I know and I know were
mischaracterized or exaggerated, designed to show that European democracies
aren't really democratic.
And speaking as a representative of the movement that brought us January
6 and an attempt to overthrow U.S. election, implying that he was more
democratic, and his movement was more democratic. And two aspects of this were
offensive. One was the fact that he didn't address any of the real security
issues. And of course, the second that he implied that the people he was
speaking to were not democrats. The import of his speech was to support the
alliance for Germany. This is a political party called the AfD, which - Germany
is in the middle of very intense elections. Actually, the election's on
February 23, so very soon.
The AfD is a far-right party, some of whose members have expressed
nostalgia or nuanced admiration for aspects of Nazi Germany. It's also a party
that has been notably pro-Russian and anti-American in the past. And that he
was expressing support for them was perceived by many of the Germans in the
room as an insult.
GROSS: I'm going to stop you there because I just want to play a clip
that illustrates the point that you're making. You know, he was talking about
Europeans being afraid of free speech and that they were using words like
misinformation and disinformation, which he described as ugly Soviet-era words.
And so he was talking about that and about how there should be room for, like,
all parties because, like, the other parties in Germany won't form an alliance
with the far-right party that you've been describing.
APPLEBAUM: Yes. But to be clear, the far-right party has access to
television. Its leader has been on television debates. It's on the ballot.
GROSS: Isn't it No. 2 in the polls?
APPLEBAUM: It's No. 2 in the polls. It's - I mean, stipulate there are a
number of parties in Germany, so it's - it looks at the moment around 20%, but
it is absolutely accessible. You can vote for it. The idea that it's somehow
repressed was a - is a figment of JD Vance's imagination.
GROSS: So here's JD Vance, speaking over the weekend at the Munich
Security Conference.
VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: And I believe deeply that there is no security
if you're afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your
very own people. Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent
faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own
making. If you're running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America
can do for you, nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the
American people who elected me and elected President Trump.
GROSS: What's your interpretation of what he said there?
APPLEBAUM: It was an insult. He was telling Europeans that he doesn't
respect their voting systems, but also he was playing with language. Again, he
represents the political movement that sought to overturn an election. So this
is a political movement that cares about the people and the voters only when
they win. Nevertheless, he was accusing Europeans of somehow not caring about
their own voters when their political systems are, in many cases, more
democratic and more grassroots-based than ours.
These are - most European countries have multiple political parties.
People have more choice in elections. You know, they are smaller countries.
People have more direct impact on their national governments when they vote. So
the idea that JD Vance was somehow implying that America's more democratic was
insulting, and it was understood that way. And as I said, it was also in a
speech where he was expected to talk about European security, armies and the
war in Ukraine, none of which he mentioned or, if so, only glancingly.
GROSS: When he says, there's nothing America can do for you, is that
meant to be some kind of threat or just a kind of, like, moral condescension?
APPLEBAUM: I think in the context, it could be interpreted as a threat.
And remembering that a few days earlier, the American secretary of defense had
said that Europe will need to begin looking elsewhere for security, had implied
that there might not be ongoing security guarantees for Europe, and had implied
that the United States might be withdrawing troops from Europe. So, yes, in
that context, it felt to many people in the room like a threat.
GROSS: So tell me what you heard from European leaders and your contacts
in Europe.
APPLEBAUM: Let me describe to you a conversation I had with a German
member of parliament who I've known for some time. I met him at Munich. I had
actually seen him at Munich the year before. And he reminded me that a year
ago, he said to me, I'm really worried that Europe will now be confronting
three autocracies - China, Russia and the United States. And this year, he said
to me, I said that last year, and this year, I can see it coming true.
Obviously, the United States is not an autocracy. It's not Russia. It's
not China. But the United States is now an adversarial power. It's a country
that is not interested in using the alliances that it has built over the last
70 years, 80 years. It is not interested in creating relationships of mutual
benefit. It thinks much more like a colonial or an imperial power. It speaks
about annexing land and territory. It's a power that Europeans now understand -
and I think this weekend really brought that home - is not a friend. And I
think that's a really big shift.
But this weekend was a - was really an earthquake. Everybody understood
this is a different kind of America. It's a different kind of American
administration. It's not one that we've seen or dealt with before, and we need
new attitudes.
GROSS: And what are Europe's primary security concerns right now,
especially if America either totally distances itself or pulls out of NATO?
APPLEBAUM: I don't think anyone expects the U.S. to pull out of NATO
because that would create a kind of drama that I don't think President Trump
wants. But I think it's important that people understand that NATO is
psychological as much as it is an alliance. NATO is a system of deterrence.
It's an agreement that - based on the famous Article 5 of the NATO treaty, it's
an agreement that if one country is attacked, then all the other countries in
the alliance are obliged to consider coming to its defense.
Once nobody believes anymore in that promise, then even if NATO still
exists as an institution and even if it still has troops on the ground, its
value as a deterrent does become more limited. So I think the fear is that the
United States will begin to say and do things that convince Russia that the
deterrent is no longer valid. And that simply means they're vulnerable.
GROSS: Yeah. Ukraine's President Zelenskyy has suggested that Europe
create its own military force independent of NATO.
APPLEBAUM: So to be clear, Europeans do have armies. Europeans have
contributed half of all the aid that has gone to Ukraine since the war has
begun. Many Europeans have invested heavily in their armies and in their
militaries over the last three years since the war started. It's not as if they
have nothing. But the way NATO is constructed, the way many European military
systems are constructed - it is with the idea that the U.S. leads. And that's,
of course, been a tremendous advantage to the U.S. It means that Europeans buy
American military equipment.
It means they defer to the United States on all kinds of decisions, and
the United States is the main decider in all kinds of security and economic and
other contexts. If the United States pulls out rapidly or the American
deterrent disappears rapidly, then it's not clear that Europe is immediately
prepared to defend itself. But there was a meeting in Paris on Monday. That was
the beginning of what I think will be a conversation about how Europe is going
to respond in this new situation.
GROSS: So during the first Trump administration, President Zelenskyy of
Ukraine seemed to try to flatter Trump as a way of courting support. Did he
shift away from that while speaking in Munich? Do you see that as a change?
APPLEBAUM: I think up until now, President Zelenskyy has been seeking to
flatter Trump. I mean, actually, the idea that Ukraine would sell some rare
earth minerals to the United States was his idea. He came up with it last
autumn. I think this weekend was a kind of break in which he is beginning to
feel that the tactics that worked in the first Trump administration don't work
now, and he's beginning to speak more to Europeans.
He's also made it clear that any kind of ceasefire in Ukraine requires
two sides. I mean, you need both sides to declare peace. It can't be one way. I
think he's also - wants to make it clear that a situation in which Ukraine
stops fighting but has no guarantee that the Russians won't invade again next
week or next month or next year, isn't really a peace. And he's been making
that very clear over the last few days.
GROSS: My guest is Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her
latest book is called "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The
World." We recorded our interview yesterday morning. Later, President
Trump was asked about Ukrainian objections to being shut out of the initial
talks to end the war. Trump responded by falsely blaming Ukraine for starting
the war with Russia. Trump said, quote, "you should have never started it.
You could have made a deal."
This morning, we reached out to Anne Applebaum for her reaction. She
emailed us this. Quote, "Trump is now repeating Russian propaganda.
Ukraine did not start the war. Ukraine has not refused to negotiate. When they
tried in 2022, Russia offered only one option - surrender. Russian goals are
the same now as at the beginning of the war - remove Ukrainian sovereignty.
Make Ukraine into a vassal state. Ukrainians know that Russian occupation would
mean death, destruction and the loss of identity. If the U.S. sides with Russia
against Ukraine, we will boost Russian allies all over the world - in China,
Iran, North Korea, Venezuela. Many people in the administration and Congress
understand what a disaster this would be for the American economy and American
power," unquote. We'll hear more of my interview with Anne Applebaum after
a break. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with journalist
Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she's been writing about
Trump's move toward authoritarianism. She was at the Munich Security Conference
over the weekend.
You have referred to Musk using X to try to influence the election in
Germany in favor of the far-right party. You know, American elections are
always being threatened by foreign interference nowadays - from China, from
Russia, from their bots, from false information, conspiracy theories. But now
Europe is worrying about foreign interference from the U.S. through social
media. You wrote a whole article about this - about how it's really, like,
threatening European elections. What are some of the biggest concerns now about
American threats to European elections?
APPLEBAUM: Most countries don't have elections that run as we run ours
in the United States. So we have a kind of Las Vegas. You can - anybody can put
as much money as they want into the campaign. Anonymously, you can pay
political action committees to use your money in various ways. You can do
internet advertising that's not tracked. Anything goes. Other countries have
rules. They have rules on campaign finance. They're allowed to have rules on
how much money you can spend. My husband ran an election campaign to the
European Parliament and his spending limit was 30,000 euros, which is about
$30,000. And if you put that in the context of the billion-dollar U.S.
campaigns, you can see that there's a big difference.
One of the things that social media - U.S. social media enables is it
enables people to get around those rules. European countries are worried that
social media algorithms are designed to promote extremes, as they do in the
United States - that the algorithms will promote parties of the extreme right
or, in some cases, of the extreme left, to the disadvantage of parties in the
center, of parties that want consensus, and also of parties that want to stay
inside the European Union and that have historically wanted to be aligned with
the United States against Russia. So, yes, there is a widespread fear now that
social media companies will be used specifically to manipulate and interfere in
European conversations in the same way they are seen to have done so in the
United States.
GROSS: There is something called the European Union's Digital Services
Act, which went into effect last year. What can it do? It's in the middle of an
investigation, right?
APPLEBAUM: The Digital Services Act was designed to create greater
transparency. So, for example, to force X or to force Facebook to reveal to
users how it uses their information, how it uses their data, how it uses their
algorithms so that it affects what they see. It's not designed to censor. There
wouldn't be a Ministry of Information that decides what can and can't be shown,
but there would be more information provided to users. The social media
companies in the United States very much resent any kind of European
regulation.
And this includes antitrust regulation, which has also affected
Microsoft and Google and other companies. And X appears to be particularly
worried about the Digital Services Act changing what it's able to do in Europe
and changing the political role that Musk seems to want to play inside
elections in Europe. One of the things that Europeans believe is that the
reason for the intervention is to promote anti-European parties who will work
against the EU and who will, therefore, prevent this regulation.
GROSS: Is that an explanation that you think is plausible? 'Cause you
wrote that a group of American oligarchs want to undermine EU institutions
because these oligarchs don't want to be regulated.
APPLEBAUM: It certainly looks like that's what's happening. There isn't
really another plausible explanation for why so many of them have begun to
support anti-European political parties. Also, it's true that some of them have
said it. Mark Zuckerberg, in a - in some statements he made a month or two ago,
said that we need to avoid any kind of regulation. JD Vance said before
Christmas in an interview that, you know, Europeans, if they - if they're going
to regulate our tech companies, then maybe we shouldn't offer them security
through NATO, which - by the way, that quotation has been much repeated and
much discussed in Europe over the last couple of months. So comments made by -
both from the tech world and from the current administration have led Europeans
to believe that this is an important motivation for the Trump administration.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you so we can take a short break. If
you're just joining us, my guest is Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The
Atlantic. Her latest book is called "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who
Want To Run The World." She's also the author of "Twilight Of
Democracy." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and
this is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my
interview with Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she's
been writing about America's turn to the right and Trump's move toward
authoritarianism. She's also written extensively about how some European
countries have become or risk becoming authoritarian. Last weekend, she was at
the Munich Security Conference, which left many European leaders stunned and
worried about Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth's
dismissiveness about NATO's importance to America. Her latest books are
"Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World" and
"Twilight Of Democracy."
Do you have any insights into why President Trump wants to distance
himself from NATO while he seems to be aligning himself with Putin?
APPLEBAUM: It's not clear to me yet that Trump is aligning himself with
Putin. It's clear that he has agreed to many of Putin's explanations of and
theories about the war in Ukraine. So he does use some of Putin's language when
he talks about the war. He seems to be influenced by Russia's propaganda and by
Russia's characterization of the war. He may also be influenced by Vance or by
Musk or by others around him who've convinced him that Europe, like other
American allies like Canada, are somehow ripping off the United States, that
he's - that the U.S. is somehow a victim of Europe. And I would say those are
more important than any kind of alignment.
I mean, he - the other thing that's important to understand about
President Trump - and I think he wouldn't deny this and nor would anybody else
around him - is that he's also capable of changing his mind very quickly. So
that's another new characteristic of U.S. foreign policy - that it's
unpredictable but unpredictable in a very profound way. I mean, he could be on
one side today and on another side tomorrow. And it's very difficult for
anybody to plan a strategy around that.
GROSS: And what are the countries that are already leaning toward
authoritarianism in Europe now?
APPLEBAUM: The poster child, the country that many people speak about
and refer to is Hungary. And Hungary's a very important country for Americans
to understand because Hungary is a country that elected democratically a
leader, Viktor Orban, who then initially - mostly legally - slowly eliminated
many of the checks and balances, many of the institutions of Hungarian
democracy, making it impossible for him to lose an election.
So he culled the Hungarian civil service by changing labor laws,
replacing professional civil servants with members of his party. He changed the
nature of the Hungarian courts over a period of time. He captured Hungarian
media, both through putting pressure - financial pressure on independent media,
empowering oligarchs and people around him, businessmen who are close to him to
buy or take over Hungarian media and then transform their nature. Of course,
Hungarian state media he took over. And slowly over time, he also repeatedly
changed the constitution, which enabled him to change the way elections are
run. And he continually made small alterations that were designed to make sure
he couldn't lose.
And this model, the Orban model, is one that has been admired, spoken of
positively by many people around Donald Trump. And of course, it has admirers
in Europe as well. Right now we have a Slovak government, which is seeking to
go down a similar road. And we had in the past, between 2015 and 2023, a Polish
government that also - again, whose leaders openly admired Orban. They talked
about building Budapest in Warsaw and sought really to take a similar path.
GROSS: You mentioned that some people on the right in America are very
supportive of Orban and admire him. He spoke to one of the CPAC conferences,
the Conservative Political Action Conference. And at one of those conferences,
he said Hungary is actually an incubator, where experiments are done on the
future of conservative politics. Hungary is the place where we didn't just talk
about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative
Christian political turn, but we actually did it. Do you think the Trump
administration has taken some actions from the Orban playbook?
APPLEBAUM: The Trump administration has absolutely taken actions from
the Orban playbook. We know, for example, Project 2025, which is - was a kind
of blueprint written by the think tank The Heritage Foundation for some of
what's happening now, for the takeover of institutions of the state - we know
that was heavily influenced by Hungarians. We know that Viktor Orban frequently
met Trump in the - during the campaign. Some of his advisers and ministers have
also met with people in the Trump administration and around it. Tucker Carlson
has extensive, long relations with the Hungarian government and has spoken in
Budapest, and he's an influential figure in the Trump administration, too. So,
yeah, we know that Hungary is a kind of model for many people.
I mean, I would draw your attention to one way in which Hungary is a
model. Hungary has also put an enormous amount of pressure on universities,
cutting their budgets, forcing them to eliminate certain kinds of programs. I
think anything with the word gender in it had to be eliminated. Gender studies
or women's studies had to be taken out of Hungarian curriculums if you wanted
to have any state money. And right now many U.S. universities are afraid that
that same kind of pressure will be applied on them, too. So you can see that
many things that were done in Hungary can and will be imitated in the United
States.
GROSS: Orban has really advocated on the far-right side of the culture
wars, and he said the woke movement and gender ideology are exactly what
communism and Marxism used to be. They artificially cut the nation into
minorities in order to spark strife among the groups.
APPLEBAUM: One of the strange thing is is there was - I didn't know what
he's talking about. I mean, there is no woke movement in Hungary. I mean, he -
most of what he...
GROSS: Yeah. I was wondering about that.
APPLEBAUM: No, no. He borrowed the American culture war and used it in
Hungary as a way of attacking his enemies. It was one of the things that he did
that Hungarians found very strange but seems to have worked. You know, he also
ran an anti-immigrant campaign, even though Hungary has very, very few
immigrants, so the immigrants were mostly fictitious. I mean, at least in the
United States, we have real immigrants. And so there's a real problem, and you
can talk about realistically how to solve it. In Hungary, it was mostly
fiction.
But he used that language, and one of the reasons he did it, I think,
was to create an international coalition around himself. He spent a lot of time
and invested a lot of money in bringing foreign conservatives from Britain,
from the United States, from other countries to Budapest. He created a special
specific think tank called the Danube Institute, which was designed to do
exactly that. He spent a lot of time projecting Hungarian ideas into other
places, and one of his ideas for how he would stay in power - in other words,
although he'd broken many rules, and although he was in violation of EU
standards of judicial independence, one of the ways he thought he would stay in
power was by finding allies outside of Hungary. And he found many inside the
United States but also in some other European countries.
GROSS: And he endorsed Trump in 2016. I don't know if he said anything
in 2020 or 2024. But it sounds like not only is the right borrowing from the
Orban playbook, but Orban is borrowing from the far-right playbook in America.
APPLEBAUM: It's - sure. It's a two-way project. I mean, I think it's
also important maybe at this point to stress that the project of destroying
your democracy as an elected leader is something that you don't have to be
right wing in order to do. So this is more or less the same kind of playbook
that Hugo Chavez used in Venezuela. You know, he also famously sacked civil
servants. There was a moment when he sacked 19,000 employees of the Venezuelan
state oil company and replaced them with loyalists, who wound up destroying the
company. He also attacked judges, media and so on.
There's actually a - the playbook is neither right wing nor left wing.
It's a playbook about undermining democracy, and it's one that has - is most
often carried out by democratically elected leaders. But these are
democratically elected leaders who characterize themselves or describe
themselves as deserving of no opposition. So I am the true Hungarian, or I am
the only real American. Or I speak for the people, and you only speak for
elites and foreigners. Or I speak for real people, real Americans, and my opponents
are radical-left lunatics or vermin. But it's a known playbook. It's unfolded
in many other countries. You know, I could name Turkey. I could name India. You
can point around the world and find a large number of them.
Nowadays, most democracies fail through these kinds of tactics and not
through a coup d'etat. You know, we have - our imagination of a coup or a
regime change is that there are tanks and violence, and, you know, somebody
shoots up the chandelier in the presidential palace. Actually, nowadays, that's
not how democracies fail. They fail through attacks on institutions coming from
within.
GROSS: My guest is journalist Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The
Atlantic, where she's been writing about America's turn toward the right and
Trump's move toward authoritarianism. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with journalist
Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she's been writing about
Trump's move toward authoritarianism. Her latest book is called
"Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World."
Let's look at Poland. Your husband is the foreign minister of Poland,
and you're very familiar with Polish politics. You live part time in Poland and
part time in Washington, D.C. Poland had moved from a hard-won democracy to
approaching authoritarianism, and then it moved back to democracy. How did it
return to democracy? Was it through resistance to authoritarianism, through
just a vote? Like, what happened to return it?
APPLEBAUM: So in Poland, we had exactly this kind of attempted illiberal
takeover of the state, and it was partly successful. The destruction of the
civil service happened. The politicization of a part of the judiciary happened.
The ruling party was never able to completely undermine or destroy the
opposition. And also, one of the effects of it being in power for eight years
was that it became very corrupt.
So one of the things that happens when you eliminate journalists and,
you know, corrupt the judges and make it hard for people to understand what the
government is doing is that people naturally start trying to steal. And that
happened in Poland on a large scale, and people began to see it. And that
offered an opening, if you will, for the political opposition, which had been
in a kind of disarray after the initial victory of this - it's called the Law
and Justice party. And they took advantage of anger about corruption and anger
about economic failure and began to build a new coalition.
I think maybe it's - couple things worth saying about Poland. One is
that the autocratic ruling party was defeated at an election because of a broad
coalition. There were three parties - center left, center right and liberal.
And it also won because of a huge effort to mobilize. They mobilized enormous
numbers of young people to vote, women. I mean, there's another aspect, which
is that Poland had a - the previous party passed an unusually harsh abortion
law, abortion being - having been illegal in Poland for a long time, but one
that meant that even women who had medical issues with birth were forced to
give birth, and some of them began to die. So that became a major political
issue as well. But they were able to mobilize people.
Poland had not destroyed its electoral system. In other words, the
election was fair in the sense that the people counting the votes were counting
them fairly. I mean, it was unfair in other ways. But there was enough
mobilization, there was enough anger, and there was a clear enough narrative
that allowed pretty disparate parties to come together and defeat at the polls
the Law and Justice party.
GROSS: So we're seeing in America right now a lot of people in civil
service - and now I'm talking about ones who aren't being fired - they're
having to decide whether they should stay in their jobs and carry out orders,
thus sacrificing their own principles of ethics and good government, or resign.
But then they risk having their position either not filled or filled by
somebody who will be pressured to just conform to orders that are not good
government kind of orders. Did that happen in Poland, where people had to make
really tough decisions about what to do?
APPLEBAUM: It did happen in Poland. I think, actually, the change in the
United States is more dramatic from a civil service that's loyal to the
Constitution and to the country and to the rule of law into a civil service
that's loyal to a single person or political party. You know, in Poland, we
didn't have those kinds of civil service traditions that went back a hundred
years, so it wasn't as dramatic. But, yes, there were people who had to make
decisions about whether to stay, whether to protest. Many people were fired.
They lost their jobs. One of the long-term effects is that there are a lot of
weaknesses in Polish government. But, yeah - no, when you have a change like
that, from one kind of system to another, that will leave people loyal to the
old system with pretty dramatic choices.
GROSS: You trace the modern civil service system back to Teddy
Roosevelt, who reformed it. What was it like before?
APPLEBAUM: So before Teddy Roosevelt, we had something called the spoils
system, or patronage. And by the way, it's something that most countries have,
I would guess, on the planet. And that meant that all civil servants were hired
and fired according to who was the president. It meant that the civil service
was often, you know, people's cousins or people's sister-in-law, or, you know,
party loyalists who needed jobs and who could be given them, at least for the
time being. The point of working for the government was not to prevent
Americans from being poisoned by air pollution or to make sure that children
got vaccines. The point of working for the government was to get a salary and
be loyal to whichever president or whichever political movement had put you
there.
Patronage systems are famously corrupt because, again, the people who
are in those jobs are only in them because they're being paid. And they're also
famously inefficient because the point is that people are hired not for their
expertise or their skills, but they're hired for their political loyalties.
Teddy Roosevelt was one of many - although he was a leading voice - in
the 19th century of arguing that this system was bad for America and that it
should end. And so the idea that the civil service should be a meritocracy -
that, in some cases, there should be exams or standards that determine who gets
hired and who gets promoted - this all dates from that era, this - kind of the
civil service reform movement. And we're so used to it in America that we don't
even notice it. We just assume that's what civil servants are, and that's what
they do. But, of course, you can end this system just as you began it. And you
could end the legal protections that civil servants enjoy, and you could
undermine or destroy their ethos, this - as I said, this ethos of neutrality
and patriotism and loyalty to the rule of law.
GROSS: You wrote that if the Trump administration succeeds in destroying
the civil service system, the universities are next. What leads you to say
that?
APPLEBAUM: Some of the tactics that have already been used against the
civil service, so these abrupt, very harsh cuts in federal funding, we've -
that's already happened. So the National Institutes for Health, NIH, already
made very big cuts in funding of biomedical research, which a handful of big
research universities noticed immediately. Orders to alter or remove so-called
DEI programs - or anything that mentions gender or diversity or minorities -
from campuses are already beginning to filter down. I believe it was the
National Science Foundation that has produced a list of suspect words to look
for in grant applications and project applications, you know, that would cause
red flags. And the words included are words like diversity and women. So anybody
who's studying something that could be construed as anything to do with
diversity or minorities, that this - these kinds of projects could be stopped.
And, of course, university presidents and administrators, including some
that I've spoken to, are afraid that this could go farther - in other words,
that federal funding could be used as a tool to alter the shape of university
departments or tell universities what they can and can't teach. And as I said a
little bit earlier, this is something that has been done in other places. This
is what happened in Hungary, and it could happen in the United States.
GROSS: Trump pardoned leaders of far-right groups that organized January
6 and were convicted of sedition, seditious conspiracy. One of those groups,
the Proud Boys - here's what the Anti-Defamation League has to say about them.
The group serves as a tent for misogynistic, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and
anti-LGBTQ+ ideologies and other forms of hate. The Southern Poverty Law Center
has designated the Proud Boys as a hate group. So the leaders of that group
were pardoned by Trump. Can you talk about the contrast between pardoning hate
groups and being against diversity, equity and inclusion?
APPLEBAUM: The Trump administration is seeking to redefine what American
basic values are - what we think is good and bad and, you know, whose voices
are heard and whose voices are suppressed. And they have decided that the
groups who backed January 6 - and this includes some on the far right and white
supremacists and so on, and people who would not be offended by you saying
that's what they are - are now proud members of the Trump coalition, and people
who have promoted diversity are not. And so I think they're seeking to redefine
our values and redefine what it means to be, you know, a central part of the
American project.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my
guest is journalist Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, where
she's been writing about America's turn toward the right and Trump's move
toward authoritarianism. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with journalist
Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she's been writing about
Trump's move toward authoritarianism. She was at the Munich Security Conference
over the weekend. Her latest book is called "Autocracy, Inc.: The
Dictators Who Want To Run The World."
You're a journalist, and you've been writing critically about Trump
since 2016 or 2015. Trump is attacking the press. He's always attacked the
press. I mean, in his first term, the press was the enemy of the people. But
now it's escalating. What are some of your concerns about the attack on the
press and where it might lead to for the press?
APPLEBAUM: My concerns about the press aren't at the moment really
personal. My real concern is about big media companies, television companies,
whose owners have other interests. And this is one of the ways in which media
in other illiberal democracies, you know, or in other declining democracies
have been affected. So if you have somebody who owns a large television station
but who's also interested in investing in something else that - for which he
needs a government license, then you could see him needing to genuflect to the
ruling party or to the leader, you know.
And we already have an example of that, which is Jeff Bezos, who's the
owner of The Washington Post, who has - seems to be making some decisions or
his newspaper is making some decisions that accommodate the Trump
administration. Bezos has many other interests in cloud computing and space
travel, all kinds of things, for all of which he would need, in some cases,
government cooperation or funding. And so his - he may also, in addition to
that, have - feel ideologically aligned with the Trump administration. That I
don't know and can't speak to. But clearly, he has mixed motives, and there are
other media owners who - of whom you could say the same. And that, in a way, is
the most dangerous thing because, you know, one journalist can be replaced or
can be brave or, you know, there are many - have all kinds of options. But it's
when the companies begin to censor themselves or begin to change the way they
show the news because of their owner's other interests.
GROSS: The White House blocked the AP, the Associated Press, from the
Oval Office and from Air Force One because the wire service used Gulf of Mexico
and not Gulf of America in its reporting. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf
of America seems like an odd and maybe not very important thing. But do you see
that as part of, like, a loyalty test? Like, who's going to say it my way, the
Gulf of America, and who's going to defy me and say Gulf of Mexico?
APPLEBAUM: I do think it's a kind of test, yes. And very often, these
tests are trivial. The test is whether you can make a news organization change
one of its policies. And if you can make it change that policy, then maybe you
can make it change other policies. Also, all the other news organizations will
be watching to see what AP does, and they will understand from AP's decision
how much freedom they have. So it's about creating a kind of chilling
atmosphere, about making journalists think twice and making media owners think
twice about decisions that they make and the language that they use. So, yes,
it's an attempt to chill the atmosphere.
GROSS: Do you have any role models for continuing to report in a time
that can be very chilling for journalists?
APPLEBAUM: Oh, there's so many. You know, the world is so full of brave
people, I mean, brave reporters, brave activists, people who try to tell the
truth in Russia, people who have been active for women's rights in Iran. You
know, the kinds of threats that we face as Americans are pretty trivial
compared to the brutality that people have faced in full dictatorships.
You know, I - in my life, I've met so many very, very brave people in so
many different kinds of countries. I'm pretty confident that Americans will be
just as brave. And so maybe that's the flip side of this story is that, you
know, we've been talking about people who'll be cowed or people who'll be
scared. I mean, there are going to be a lot of people who are brave and who
will want to tell the truth and continue to expose lies and continue to write
just freely about the government the way they've written freely about all
governments - you know, Joe Biden's government or Barack Obama's government.
I'm pretty confident there'll be plenty of Americans who will do that.
GROSS: Anne Applebaum, thank you so much for coming back to FRESH AIR.
APPLEBAUM: Thank you.
GROSS: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her latest
book is "Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World."
Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, Rich Benjamin, the grandson of a popular Haitian
labor leader who became president of Haiti in 1957 but was overthrown by a
military coup after 19 days. Benjamin will talk about getting classified
documents showing the U.S. role in the coup, and we'll hear about Benjamin's
experiences as a Black gay Haitian American who came out during the AIDS
epidemic. I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get
highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair.
FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director
and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our
interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie
Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner,
Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is
Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya
Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
Under Trump, America’s New Friends: Russia, North Korea and Belarus
When it comes to the war in Ukraine, President Trump finds common cause with the world’s outlier states and stands against traditional U.S. allies like Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Japan and Italy…: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/us/politics/trump-diplomacy.html
Journal Writers Look Ahead to Trump 47
Our hopes, fears and expectations for the first nonconsecutive White
House term in 132 years.
Jan. 17, 2025
Billionaire wealth grew by $2
trillion in 2024 alone, equivalent to roughly $5.7 billion a day, at a rate
three times faster than the year before. An average of nearly four new
billionaires were minted every week. Meanwhile, the number of people living in
poverty has barely changed since 1990, according to World Bank data.
20th January 2025
- Oxfam predicts there will be at least five trillionaires a decade
from now.
- 204 new billionaires were minted in 2024, nearly four every week.
- Sixty percent of billionaire wealth is now derived from
inheritance, monopoly power or crony connections, as Oxfam argues that
“extreme billionaire wealth is largely unmerited.”
- Richest 1 percent in the Global North extracted $30 million an hour
from the Global South through the financial system in 2023.
- Oxfam urges governments to tax the richest to reduce inequality,
end extreme wealth, and dismantle the new aristocracy. Former colonial
powers must address past harms with reparations.
Billionaire wealth grew by $2 trillion in 2024 alone, equivalent to roughly
$5.7 billion a day, at a rate three times faster than the year before. An
average of nearly four new billionaires were minted every week.
Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty has barely changed
since 1990, according to World Bank data.
In 2024, the number of billionaires rose to 2,769, up from 2,565 in
2023. Their combined wealth surged from $13 trillion to $15 trillion in just 12
months. This is the second largest annual increase in billionaire wealth since
records began. The wealth of the world’s ten richest men grew on average by
almost $100 million a day —even if they lost 99 percent of their wealth
overnight, they would remain billionaires.
Last year, Oxfam predicted the emergence of the first trillionaire
within a decade. However, with billionaire wealth accelerating at a faster pace
this projection has expanded dramatically —at current rates the world is now on
track to see at least five trillionaires within that timeframe.
This ever-growing concentration of wealth is enabled by a monopolistic
concentration of power, with billionaires increasingly exerting influence over
industries and public opinion.
Oxfam publishes “Takers Not Makers” today as business elites
gather in the Swiss resort town of Davos and billionaire Donald Trump, backed
by the world’s richest man Elon Musk, is inaugurated as President of the United
States.
“The capture of our global economy by a privileged few has reached
heights once considered unimaginable. The failure to stop billionaires is now
spawning soon-to-be trillionaires. Not only has the rate of billionaire wealth
accumulation accelerated —by three times— but so too has their power,” said
Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar.
“The crown jewel of this oligarchy is a billionaire president, backed
and bought by the world’s richest man Elon Musk, running the world’s largest
economy. We present this report as a stark wake up-call that ordinary people
the world over are being crushed by the enormous wealth of a tiny few,” said
Behar.
The report also shines a light on how, contrary to popular perception,
billionaire wealth is largely unearned —60 percent of billionaire wealth now
comes from inheritance, monopoly power or crony connections. Unmerited wealth
and colonialism —understood as not only a history of brutal wealth extraction
but also a powerful force behind today’s extreme levels of inequality— stand as
two major drivers of billionaire wealth accumulation.
Oxfam’s calculates that 36 percent of billionaire wealth is now
inherited. Research by Forbes found that every billionaire under 30 has
inherited their wealth, while UBS estimates that over 1,000 of today’s
billionaires will pass on more than $5.2 trillion to their heirs over the next
two to three decades.
Many of the super-rich, particularly in Europe, owe part of their wealth
to historical colonialism and the exploitation of poorer countries. For
example, the fortune of billionaire Vincent Bolloré, who has put his sprawling
media ‘empire’ at the service of France's nationalist right, was built partly
from colonial activities in Africa.
This dynamic of wealth extraction persists today: vast sums of money
still flow from the Global South to countries in the Global North and their
richest citizens, in what Oxfam’s report describes as modern-day colonialism.
- The richest 1 percent in Global North countries like the US, UK and
France extracted $30 million an hour from the Global South through the
financial system in 2023.
- Global North countries control 69 percent of global wealth, 77
percent of billionaire wealth and are home to 68 percent of billionaires,
despite making up just 21 percent of the global population.
- The average Belgian has about 180 times more voting power in the
largest arm of the World Bank than the average Ethiopian.
Low- and middle-income countries spend on average nearly half of their national
budgets on debt repayments, often to rich creditors in New York and London.
This far outstrips their combined investment in education and healthcare.
Between 1970 and 2023, Global South governments paid $3.3 trillion in interest
to Northern creditors.
The history of empire, racism and exploitation has left a lasting legacy
of inequality. Today, the average life expectancy of Africans is still more
than 15 years shorter than that of Europeans. Research shows that wages in the
Global South are 87 to 95 percent lower than wages in the Global North for work
of equal skill. Despite contributing 90 percent of the labor that drives the
global economy, workers in low- and middle-income countries receive only 21
percent of global income.
Globally, women are more often found in the most vulnerable forms of
informal employment, including domestic work, than their male counterparts.
Migrant workers in rich countries earn, on average, about 13 percent less than
nationals, with the wage gap rising to 21 percent for women migrants.
“The ultra-rich like to tell us that getting rich takes skill, grit and
hard work. But the truth is most wealth is taken, not made. So many of the
so-called ‘self-made’ are actually heirs to vast fortunes, handed down through
generations of unearned privilege. Untaxed billions of dollars in inheritance
is an affront to fairness, perpetuating a new aristocracy where wealth and
power stays locked in the hands of a few,” said Behar.
“Meanwhile, the money desperately needed in every country to invest in
teachers, buy medicines and create good jobs is being siphoned off to the bank
accounts of the super-rich. This is not just bad for the economy —it’s bad for
humanity."
Oxfam is calling on governments to act rapidly to reduce inequality and
end extreme wealth:
- Radically reduce inequality. Governments
need to commit to ensuring that, both globally and at a national level,
the incomes of the top 10 percent are no higher than the bottom 40
percent. According to World Bank data, reducing inequality could end
poverty three times faster. Governments must also tackle and end the
racism, sexism and division that underpin ongoing economic exploitation.
- Tax the richest to end extreme wealth. Global tax policy should fall under a new UN tax convention,
ensuring the richest people and corporations pay their fair share. Tax
havens must be abolished. Oxfam’s analysis shows that half of the world’s
billionaires live in countries with no inheritance tax for direct
descendants. Inheritance needs to be taxed to dismantle the new
aristocracy.
- End the flow of wealth from South to North. Cancel debts and end the dominance of rich countries and
corporations over financial markets and trade rules. This means breaking
up monopolies, democratizing patent rules, and regulating corporations to
ensure they pay living wages and cap CEO pay. Restructure voting powers in
the World Bank, IMF and UN Security Council to guarantee fair
representation of Global South countries. Former colonial powers must also
confront the lasting harm caused by their colonial rule, offer formal
apologies, and provide reparations to affected communities.
Notes to editors
Download Oxfam’s report “Takers
not Makers” and the methodology note.
According to the World
Bank, the actual number of people living on less than $6.85 a day has
barely changed since 1990.
Billionaire data is based on Oxfam's analysis of Forbes’ Real-Time
Billionaire List as of the end of November 2024 and is adjusted to
inflation to 2024 prices.
Forbes data indicates that the largest annual increase in billionaire
wealth ($5.8 trillion) occurred in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was
driven largely by governments injecting trillions of dollars into the economy.
Oxfam calculates that 60 percent of billionaire wealth is either from
crony or monopolistic sources or inherited. Specifically, 36 percent is
inherited, 18 percent comes from monopoly power, and 6 percent is from crony
connections.
Research by Forbes found
that, for the first time since 2009, every billionaire under 30 inherited their
wealth —“a sign that the ‘great wealth transfer’ has begun.”
According to UBS,
more than 1,000 billionaires are expected to pass $5.2 trillion to their heirs
over the next 20 to 30 years.
Vincent Bolloré bought
several former colonial companies in Africa, taking advantage of the
wave of privatizations spurred by the structural adjustment programs imposed by
the IMF and the World Bank in the 1990s. This strategy enabled Bolloré to build
an extensive
transport-logistics network in Africa, operating in 42 ports across the
continent.
Amin
Mohseni-Cheraghlou’s research shows that the average Belgian has
about 180 times more voting power in the International Bank for Reconstruction
and Development (IBRD), the largest arm of the World Bank, when compared to the
average Ethiopian.
On average, low-
and middle-income countries are spending 48 percent of their national budgets
on debt repayments.
In 2023, the average
life expectancy in Africa is 63.8 years, compared to 79.1 years in
Europe.
Jason
Hickel, Morena Hanbury Lemos and Felix Barbour found that
“Southern wages are 87 percent to 95 percent lower than Northern wages for work
of equal skill. While Southern workers contribute 90 percent of the labor that
powers the world economy, they receive only 21 percent of global income.”
According to the ILO,
women in the informal economy are more often found in the most vulnerable
situations, for instance as domestic workers, home-based workers or
contributing family workers, than their male counterparts.
ILO data
also shows that migrant workers in high-income countries earn about 12.6
percent less than nationals, on average. The pay gap between men nationals and
migrant women in high-income countries is estimated at 20.9 percent, which is
much wider than the aggregate gender pay gap in high-income countries (16.2
percent).
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-wealth-surges-2-trillion-2024-three-times-faster-year-while-number
The global AI race
and defense's new frontier
Driving artificial
intelligence in defense
Navigating the AI
revolution in defense
As artificial
intelligence (AI) rapidly advances, its transformative impact on industries
worldwide is undeniable, and the defense sector is no exception. Unlike past
technological shifts, AI is not merely a tool but a catalyst for entirely new
paradigms. Its applications go beyond enhancing operational efficiency,
offering capabilities that fundamentally redefine mission effectiveness, speed,
precision, and the scale of military operations.
This report delves
into AI's transformative potential in defense, exploring its influence on
military capabilities and assessing the emerging race for AI dominance. It
showcases the diverse applications of AI, from predictive analytics and
autonomous systems to robust cyber defense and intelligence-gathering.
These innovations
are poised to become central to maintaining military superiority in an
increasingly complex and interconnected global environment. The report also
addresses the critical ethical and operational challenges that accompany AI's
development and adoption, emphasizing the need for responsible AI practices in
defense as a foundation for global legitimacy and trust. AI as an
exponential driver of military capabilities
Modern militaries
operate within an environment of unprecedented complexity, where the volume of
available data, the speed of technological change, and the sophistication of
adversarial strategies continue to grow at an exponential rate. Traditional
decision-making processes, often constrained by human cognitive limits,
struggle to keep pace with the continuous influx of intelligence reports,
sensor feeds, and cyber threat alerts saturating today’s strategic and
operational landscapes.
In response to
these challenges, artificial intelligence has emerged as a key enabler of
next-generation defense capabilities, offering militaries the potential to
identify meaningful patterns hidden within massive datasets, anticipate
critical logistical demands, and detect hostilities before they materialize.
Furthermore, multi-domain operations – integrating land, air, maritime, cyber,
and space capabilities – are increasingly reliant on AI to ensure coordinated
action across these interconnected arenas. AI-driven solutions promise to
enhance the agility and resilience of armed forces as they contend with
complex, multi-domain threats.
As highlighted by
NATO and other defense organizations, the integration of AI into multi-domain
operations represents a transformative shift that amplifies the scope and
efficacy of military capabilities across all domains. Failure to integrate
risks undermining the full potential of AI in defense, leaving forces
vulnerable in environments where dominance is increasingly dictated by
technological superiority.
The main potential
lies in the synergy created by AI-driven collaboration across military systems,
which holds the promise of securing battlefield superiority. The following
areas highlight where AI is making remarkable strides, providing immediate and
tangible benefits to defense stakeholders through demonstrable progress and
operational maturity:
Global ambitions
and the race for AI leadership
With the vast
potential of AI in defense and its current applications on the battlefield,
understanding who leads in the global AI defense race is crucial. In today's
multi-polar and crisis-laden environment, gaining insight into the strategic
priorities, technological advancements, and competitive dynamics is essential
for shaping the future of military capabilities worldwide. Below are key
factors that determine a country's position in this high-stakes race:
- 1.
AI-readiness: This factor
encompasses the technological maturity and sophistication of AI technologies
that have been developed and deployed. It also includes the integration of AI
into military doctrine, highlighting the extent to which AI has been infused
into defense strategies and combat operations.
- 2.
Strategic
autonomy: This refers to a nation's ability to independently develop and
deploy AI technologies without relying on foreign suppliers. It also considers
the scale and focus of investments in AI research, particularly in
defense-specific applications.
- 3.
Ethics and
governance: This aspect involves balancing the drive for innovation with
ethical considerations and global norms, ensuring that AI development aligns
with responsible practices.
Vision and impacts
of AI-driven defense
The integration of
AI into defense systems is revolutionizing military operations, paving the way
for a future marked by enhanced efficiency, precision, and adaptability. By
2030, AI technologies are anticipated to play a crucial role in reshaping how
defense organizations manage resources, make decisions, and execute complex
missions across various domains. From optimizing supply chains and automating
battlefield operations to empowering decision-makers with predictive insights,
AI is set to become an indispensable force multiplier. These are the key areas
where AI's impact will be most transformative:
Predictive
decision-making
Collaborative
autonomous systems
Dynamic resource
management
However, the
deployment of AI in defense comes with significant risks and potential
conflicts of interest, which could lead to strategic fragmentation and
stagnation in AI deployment. Therefore, the utilization of AI must be carefully
evaluated and deliberately managed to ensure that its deployment aligns with
the core values of democratic norms and systems within the Western alliance.
Vision 2027+: A
roadmap for Germany
Germany stands at
a critical crossroads in its defense strategy, where integrating AI is not just
an option but a necessity. To establish itself as a leader in responsible
AI-driven defense, Germany must develop a clear, action-oriented roadmap that
addresses its challenges while leveraging its strengths. This vision for 2027
and beyond is built on four key priorities: AI sovereignty, NATO and EU
interoperability, fostering innovation ecosystems, and leadership in ethical AI
governance.
Achieving these
goals will involve a phased approach. Between now and 2027, Germany's focus
should be on creating the right environment for AI integration, testing pilot
projects, and scaling successful initiatives to full operational capabilities.
By following this roadmap, Germany can position itself as a leader in
responsible AI for defense, aligning operational effectiveness with ethical
standards:
Navigating the AI
frontier
Artificial
intelligence is reshaping the way nations approach defense, strategy, and
security in the 21st century. By 2030, the integration of AI technologies in
areas such as predictive decision-making, collaborative autonomous systems, and
dynamic resource management is set to revolutionize military operations,
offering unprecedented precision, agility, and resilience.
To harness AI's
full potential while mitigating risks, defense organizations must prioritize
the establishment of robust ethical frameworks, transparent accountability
mechanisms, and international collaboration. These initiatives will ensure the
responsible use of AI and maintain trust and legitimacy in the global security
arena.
To continue being
a significant military power and a key player in NATO and the EU, Germany must
act decisively to address institutional fragmentation, cultural resistance, and
underinvestment in talent and infrastructure. By leveraging its world-class research
institutions, industrial expertise, and international partnerships, Germany can
create an AI defense ecosystem founded on ethical governance and innovation.
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