I am quite frightened by the Chinese government’s actions, but it’s evident that if we are going to use moral authority the US must actually demonstrate we deserve it.
Addressing the Chinese government threat means - in part - pulling back on the legacy of immoral and destructive wars and subversions of democracy our foreign policy establishment loves.
The question isn’t whether the US is morally good. The question is whether the world operates according to US norms or Chinese government norms. Right now a good chunk of the world sees no difference, for legitimate reasons.
The Chinese government cynically uses the flaws of the US to mask its own aggressive choices, and its current hostile posture with Taiwan, Australia, the UK, India, Japan, Vietnam, etc. But the flaws are real, serious, and fixable.
Yes, JFK argued that the common defense required making our institutions work for everyone. The question for Americans is whether we have a common identity and want to make our institutions function for all of us.
The idea of patriotism in service of making a common society through our political institutions is at odds with the current dominant political ideology of focusing on our differences. bostonreview.net/archives/BR28.…

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More from @matthewstoller

23 Mar
1. Here's a little story about how Google's search monopoly kills and harms a lot of people. There's no reason for this, except that economists and Obama era enforcers chose to structure Google to let it do so. Follow along. mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-biden-ca…
2. Last week, @leah_nylen broke one of the biggest political scandals of the decade - the choice by Obama officials to not bring anti-monopoly charges against Google. The story seems like a business story, so people don't get how society-shaking it is. politico.com/news/2021/03/1…
3. We see glimpses. Like Google sending users trying to recover from addiction to sham treatment centers, and making money from ads as it does it. theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257…
Read 22 tweets
22 Mar
This week, the Arizona state Senate will debate a law attacking the monopoly Google and Apple have over app stores. Bizarrely, a few weeks ago, it was the Arizona Democrats - not the GOP - who were making extreme libertarian arguments in service of big tech. I clipped the debate.
It's hard to overstate the extreme nature of these claims. One Democrat objects on grounds that the state has no role intervening among private parties in a market. That logic would invalidate environmental, labor, and civil rights rules!
I wrote up the contours of the Arizona fight against big tech monopoly power a few weeks ago. mattstoller.substack.com/p/apple-threat…
Read 6 tweets
19 Mar
Good. The CCP loves to make fools of Western diplomats who think that endless rounds of intentionally pointless dialogue is leading somewhere.
The Chinese government is a dangerous and totalitarian force bent on destroying the rule of law and Western democracy. It's heartening that the Biden administration is taking a tough line.
Chinese strategists have rightly identified Wall Street as the achilles heel of the United States, and are exploiting our greed and short-term oriented willingness to do anything for cash. The challenge the CCP presents is not just external.
Read 4 tweets
18 Mar
House Antitrust Subcommittee hearing on legislative proposals to change the antitrust laws streaming now.
Wow, Judge Diane Wood attacks Robert Bork, Trinko, the consumer welfare standard in antitrust... docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU…
"The only problem with Professor Bork’s assertion that it is clear that the Sherman Act was only about “consumer welfare,” as he defined it, is that there is little to no support in the legislative history of the statute to support it." - Judge Diane Wood
Read 24 tweets
15 Mar
A good chunk of the elite political world built well-financed networks and careers boosting Obama as victim, so they can't concede he had power and was a bad leader. That's why they mocked the economic anxiety narrative, because it implicated their own institutions.
It's incredibly obvious that economic anxiety fostered by decades of bad policy - including Obama's mishandling of the financial crisis - enabled Trump. It's beyond debate. But institutional networks on the center-left expunged those who made these points.
A lot of the anger at Substack types - @mtaibbi and @ggreenwald - is a holdover from their skepticism towards Obama's financial and national security policies. They didn't kowtow to liberal pieties during the Obama era, and they are hated for it.
Read 4 tweets
15 Mar
1. I cover monopolies in my newsletter, and all their bizarre and harmful effects. Today I showed how a merger in the salt industry - yes salt - could spike car accidents in the Midwest. And it gets weirder. mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-a-salt-m…
2. Yes we need semiconductors and search engines and app stores, but the reality is all the basic old-timey stuff - steel, railroads, brass, and yes salt - is still as essential as it ever was. America needs salt. Not just for food, but to stop car accidents.
3. If we don’t have salt, Midwesterners can't drive, because salt is what keeps our roads manageable. Without salt, trucks can’t deliver supplies and the economy comes to a standstill. Every year, over 1300 people die in car accidents due to snowy, slushy, or icy pavement
Read 17 tweets

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