Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down the Gates

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Wisconsin teen killed parents in plot to assassinate Trump, ‘save white race’
by Muri Assuncao | [email protected]
New York Daily News
PUBLISHED: April 13, 2025 at 8:56 AM CDT
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/04/ ... lot-trump/

A Wisconsin teenager is accused of killing his parents as part of an extremist plot to assassinate President Donald Trump and start a revolution to “save the white race,” newly unsealed federal court documents show.

Nikita Casap, 17, was arrested last month after his mother, 35-year-old Tatiana Casap, and stepfather, 51-year-old Donald Mayer, were found dead inside their home in Waukesha, just east of Milwaukee.

He was charged with two counts of first-degree intentional homicide and other crimes, the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department announced on March 27.

This week, a search warrant filed with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin was unsealed, painting a chilling picture of the teen’s motivation behind his alleged crimes.

According to documents, investigators found materials on electronic devices used by the teen in which he appeared to share the views of a neo-Nazi group named “The Order of Nine Angels” — which is described by investigators as “a network of individuals holding new-Nazi, racially motivated, extremist views." Investigators also found documents that refer to a manifesto that calls for the “assassination of the President of the United States in order to foment a political revolution in the United States and ‘save the white races’ from ‘Jewish controlled’ politicians.’”

The manifesto also contained images of Adolf Hitler and the text “HITLER HAIL THE WHITE RACE HAIL VICTORY,” according to the unsealed documents.

Investigators believe Casap murdered his parents to “obtain the financial means and autonomy necessary” to carry out his plan to kill the president and overthrow the government.

“As to why, specifically Trump, I think it’s pretty obvious,” the manifesto reads. “By getting rid of the president and perhaps the vice president, that is guaranteed to bring in some chaos.”

Casap is currently in custody on a $1 million bond, according to Milwaukee’s ABC affiliate, WISN.

His next court appearance is scheduled for May 7, ABC News reported, citing the Waukesha County court docket.

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Pentagon turmoil deepens: Top Hegseth aide leaves post. “There is a complete meltdown in the building,” one official said.
by Daniel Lippman and Jack Detsch
Politico
04/18/2025 05:27 PM EDT
Updated: 04/18/2025 08:30 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/1 ... e-00299508

Joe Kasper, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s chief of staff will leave his role in the coming days for a new position at the agency, according to a senior administration official, amid a week of turmoil for the Pentagon.

Senior adviser Dan Caldwell, Hegseth deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, were placed on leave this week in an ongoing leak probe. All three were terminated on Friday, according to three people familiar with the matter, who, like others, were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

The latest incidents add to the Pentagon’s broader upheaval in recent months, including fallout from Hegseth’s release of sensitive information in a Signal chat with other national security leaders and a controversial department visit by Elon Musk.

Caldwell, Carroll, Selnick and Kasper declined to comment. Two of the people said Carroll and Selnick plan to sue for wrongful termination. The Pentagon did not respond to a request of comment.

Kasper had requested an investigation into Pentagon leaks in March, which included military operational plans for the Panama Canal, a second carrier headed to the Red Sea, Musk’s visit and a pause in the collection of intelligence for Ukraine.

But some at the Pentagon also started to notice a rivalry between Kasper and the fired advisers.

“Joe didn’t like those guys,” said one defense official. “They all have different styles. They just didn’t get along. It was a personality clash.”

The changes will leave Hegseth without a chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, or senior adviser in his front office.

“There is a complete meltdown in the building, and this is really reflecting on the secretary’s leadership,” said a senior defense official. “Pete Hegseth has surrounded himself with some people who don’t have his interests at heart.”

This week’s terminations follow a purge of top military officers in February, including former Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti.

“There probably will be more chaos,” said a third defense official. “It certainly reinforces the fear factor, awareness that no one’s job is safe.”

Other officials wondered what this would mean for Hegseth, a still inexperienced Pentagon leader who has just lost many of his top advisers.

“The front office has some really first-rate uniformed military staff, but there’s only so much they can pick up in an organization that big,” said a former Trump administration official. “That kind of dysfunction compounds.”

Democrats pointed to the firings as another example of Hegseth’s inability to lead the agency.

“Everyone knew that Pete Hegseth did not possess the leadership qualities, background, or experience to be Secretary of Defense,” said Chris Meagher, who served as assistant Defense secretary for public affairs during the Biden administration. “Everything we’ve seen since then — the firing of several American heroes because of perceived lack of loyalty, the sloppiness of Signalgate, the complete lack of transparency, and now several political staff being shown the door — has only confirmed he doesn’t have what it takes to lead.”

********************

'Complete meltdown': Top Pentagon staffers fired as 'chaos' engulfs Hegseth’s inner circle
by Carl Gibson, AlterNet
April 18, 2025 9:25PM ET
https://www.rawstory.com/pete-hegseth-2671803413/

An exodus of top staffers reporting directly to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is apparently roiling the Pentagon as part of a growing investigation into potential leaks.

Politico reported Friday that three senior Pentagon officials have now been fired as part of the leak investigation: Hegseth senior advisor Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll — who was Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg's chief of staff — have all been officially terminated. And Joe Kasper, who was Hegseth's own chief of staff, is now leaving the Pentagon for a separate job in the Pentagon.

With these staffing changes, the top United States military official is now without a chief of staff, a deputy chief of staff and a senior advisor, less than 100 days into his tenure. An unnamed "senior defense official" suggested to Politico that Hegseth made poor choices for who to trust in his inner circle, with another source saying there would likely be more "chaos" to follow in the coming days.

“There is a complete meltdown in the building, and this is really reflecting on the secretary’s leadership,” the source said. “Pete Hegseth has surrounded himself with some people who don’t have his interests at heart.”

Additional firings may be announced soon. According to CBS senior White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs, "at least one uniformed Pentagon official" was also fired in addition to Hegseth's top aides. Chris Meagher, who was assistant Defense secretary for public affairs during former President Joe Biden's administration, opined that the exodus of top staff at the Pentagon was proof that the former part-time weekend Fox News host may not be capable of heading the Department of Defense.

"Everyone knew that Pete Hegseth did not possess the leadership qualities, background, or experience to be Secretary of Defense,” Meagher told Politico. “Everything we’ve seen since then — the firing of several American heroes because of perceived lack of loyalty, the sloppiness of Signalgate, the complete lack of transparency, and now several political staff being shown the door — has only confirmed he doesn’t have what it takes to lead."

As Meagher mentioned, the current leak investigation isn't Hegseth's first scandal as secretary of Defense. In March, Hegseth shared highly sensitive attack plans for airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen on a Signal group text thread with other top administration officials. The details of that chat were made public by Atlantic magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who was inadvertently added to the chat by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz.

Click here to read Politico's article in its entirety.

Copyright © 2025 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009

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Trump Civil War ERUPTS As NEW Hegseth Text SCANDAL LEAKS!
by Jack Cocchiarella
Apr 20, 2025

Political commentator Jack Cocchiarella reacts to the latest Pete Hegseth Scandal.



Transcript

[Jack Cocchiarella] Any given day in Donald Trump's
administration can be defined by one of
three words: chaos corruption or
criminality And today we saw all three
of those come together in a breaking
news story out of the New York Times
reporting on Donald Trump's own DUI hire
in Pete Hegth who somehow someway has
another signal scandal The one group
chat was not enough for Pete because he
decided he'd break the law with another
and what he shared in there and with who
will shock and disturb you We're going
to get into all of it and the MAGA civil
war that is erupting because of this
decision by Hexath But before we do it I
could quickly ask you to leave a like on
this video and if you haven't already
and you enjoy our channel to hit that
subscribe button It goes a long way and
it really does mean a lot to me Now
before we get into this story from the
New York Times I feel like we need some
context in what just happened that might
have led to this leak out of the
Pentagon And that was the firing of
three officials that was broken down
right here on
MSNBC New alarming reports reveal
deepening turmoil at the Pentagon under
Defense Secretary Pete Hgsth Politico
reporting Hex's chief of staff will soon
step down and that three other top
officials were put on leave and then
fired over their role in the signal chat
scandal In a Washington Post report the
three officials claim they were never
told what they were investigated for or
if there was even a real investigation
of leaks to begin with Joining us now is
former deputy Pentagon press secretary
Sabrina Singh Sabrina thanks for joining
us And you know HEGs already
short-handed leadership team is now
without four of the senior officials I
was just describing He also uh oversaw
the removal of almost a dozen senior
military leaders including the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Uh is this
normal new chief new team or is there a
plus plus in this and what is that plus+
well I mean quite frankly no Nothing
about this is normal You don't see an
immediate purge of your senior
leadership that you have not only
elected to be around you um but
appointed yourself as a secretary of
defense So um again what's being
reported too is that these individuals
were fired because of unauthorized
disclosures whether that be to the press
or elsewhere Um and what's ironic here
is that the Secretary of Defense the
person who leads uh you know our men and
women in uniform and our civilians um
also put unauthorized you know
classified information into a commercial
texting app And yet there have been no
consequences for him He has not been
held responsible He hasn't even you know
gone before Congress to explain his
behavior So um you know of course
different circumstances for different
people but nothing about this is normal
And I think um you know Congress and and
others should really look into you know
not only the firings of these
individuals but also of course looking
into Pete Hex Let's dig a little deeper
here Sabrina The three fired officials
they're claiming that unnamed Pentagon
officials slandered their character with
baseless attacks their words They also
say they don't know if there is still an
active investigation into the signal
leak When we think of the Pentagon and
you know this culture better than I do
we're thinking of decorum rank and file
and process and structure This doesn't
seem to be the case at least based on
what they are saying
Yeah And the Pentagon is an organization
that certainly um not only thrives on
structure and order but there is due
process And that's and that's the case
usually with any organization or agency
So to see these firings and you know to
have these individuals speak out and
actually say we have no idea why we were
removed from our jobs um either means
that there hasn't been an official
investigation launched into their
removings or they're just not aware of
it So I wanted to start with that story
because there is a reason we are getting
this new reporting about Pete Hegsth why
more information is coming out about his
signal scandal and it's because those
close to the matter have started to
reveal it Now I don't know exactly who
those people could be who those sources
are but it is it is not uh not difficult
to put together some Pentagon officials
being fired unjustly and without cause
and new information coming out about
Pete Haggath But I don't want to
speculate anymore I just want to get
into this story right here Hegs said to
have shared attack details in second
signal chat The defense secretary sent
sensitive information about strikes in
Yemen to an encrypted group chat that
included his wife and brother People
familiar with the matter said Defense
Secretary Pete Hgsth shared detailed
information about forthcoming strikes in
Yemen on March 15th at a private signal
group chat that included his wife
brother and personal lawyer According to
four people with the knowledge of that
chat some of those people said the
information Mr Hegsath shared on the
signal chat including the flight
schedules for the FA18 Hornets targeting
the Houthis in Yemen Essentially the
same attack plans that he shared on a
separate signal group chat the same day
that mistakenly included the editor of
The Atlantic Mr for Hegsath's wife
Jennifer a former Fox News producer is
not a Defense Department employee but
she has traveled with him overseas and
drawn criticism for accompanying her
husband to sensitive meetings with
foreign leaders Mr Hegathth's brother
Phil and Tim who continues to serve as
his personal lawyer both have jobs in
the Pentagon but it is not clear why
they would need to know about upcoming
military strikes aimed at the Houthis in
Yemen This previously unreported
existence of the second signal chat in
which Mr Hgsith shared highly sensitive
military information is the latest in a
series of developments that have put his
management and judgment under scrutiny
Unlike the chat in which the Atlantic
was mistakenly included the newly
revealed one was created by Mr Hegath It
included his wife and about a dozen
other people from his personal and
professional inner circle in January
before his com confirmation as defense
secretary and was named defense team
huddle The people familiar with the chat
said he used his private phone rather
than his government one to access the
signal chat Mr Hegsth created the
separate signal group initially as a
forum for discussing routine
administrative or scheduling information
Two of the people familiar with the chat
said the people said Mr Hegsathth
typically did not use the chat to
discuss sensitive military operations
and said it did not include other
cabinet level officials Mr Hegsth shared
information about the Yemen strikes in
the defense team huddled chat at roughly
the same time he was putting the same
details in other signal group chats that
included senior US officials and the
Atlantic and people familiar with
Hegathth and the group chat said so Pete
Hegth just letting it all rip All of our
information he has decided to share with
exclusively the people closest to him
who should not have access to it But
this is no surprise Pete Hgsth has had
lots of experience poorly managing much
smaller organizations than the Pentagon
So the fact that he's been unable to do
this job in only the first couple of
months shouldn't come as no surprise We
talked about this We talked about not
only his personal failings but his
professional failings and how he was
unable to do any job comparable to this
one Why it was just inconceivable that
he would be the Secretary of Defense and
that he still has this job Now like I
said at the beginning of this video
there have been firings throughout the
Pentagon of those viewed as disloyal to
Hegsth and to try to scapegoat other
people for his own I don't want to call
it drunk texting but potential drunk
texting in his signal group chat with
Mike Waltz and Tulsi Gabbard He is
trying to put the blame elsewhere but
it's clear that the blame lies with Pete
Pete alone and he is putting people's
lives in danger As Senator Mark Kelly
talked about the last time we got a
breaking news signal scandal which seems
crazy to say that we're doing the last
time already but this is what Senator
Kelly had to say Let me ask you another
question about national security Um I I
I was struck by this very well-reported
piece in the Times about the signal chat
leak Uh this this was talking to
particularly military pilots about their
reaction to it One former senior defense
department official with military
experience said Mr Hgseek's test
describing launch times and the type of
strike aircraft was indeed classified
information that could have jeopardized
pilots's lives if it had been released
or obtained I saw a few viral Tik Toks
of military spouses expressing rage
about this What do you think as a former
naval aviator yourself who had to walk
out to an airplane in the middle of the
night to go on a strike like this when
Dick Cheney was secretary of defense i
think never for one second did I think
the Secretary of Defense was going to
put me at risk And it is significant
risk They're saying this wasn't
classified This is the most sensitive
information we have in the military when
you're going to send service members
troops
pilots feet dry in this case you know
over land in a contested area where they
have a significant surfaceto air missile
capability They have SA3s SA6 I've had
an SA6 blow up next to my airplane on my
first combat mission That that missile
can shoot down an F-18 without a doubt
If they know you're coming when you're
coming the direction you're coming from
and on top of that the time on target
they know to have all their resources
focused on shooting you down and that
helps them significantly So of course
these pilots are upset about it Pete
Hegath put them at significant risk He
crossed a line no secretary of defense
should ever cross and he needs to be
held accountable for this What do you
make of the lying i I really find this
part in some ways some of the most
unnerving I mean to say it's not
classified It's like well the timing and
of I'm not even sure what they mean by
that Maybe they meant because no it
doesn't say secret or top secret on the
signal chain right but like of course it
is Of course it is It came off of a
piece of paper that probably said top
secret at the top or he got it over the
phone from the head of SNCOM on the
combatant commander that said here's and
by the way you look at the times it it
wasn't around a certain time it's like
15:16 3:16 p.m or 1410 which is 2:10 p.m
These are exact times that came from a
plan Now they're saying "Well these
aren't war plans." I'll give them that I
mean a war plan would be joint forces
Sure it would be it would include allies
This is a strike plan These and these
plans by the way are also planned by
those pilots that are in the cockpit So
they planned the strike right they
communicated it to leadership it got
approved and then the secretary of
defense decides to throw it out on an
unsecured platform which by the way
could have gotten to the Russians could
have gotten to the Iranians and
ultimately to the Houthies It also
struck me that Jim Hemes Democratic
congressman said this the other day that
like there was no real reason to do it
that it was it was almost kind of
showing off like there's he didn't have
to send that away right is that right or
he could have sent it afterwards right
if that would have come out 15 minutes
after those airplanes got back to the
aircraft carrier those guys were safely
aboard If you want to send that stuff
out fine That information is not
valuable to anybody anymore Not really
But to do it beforehand is is such such
a disservice to what these guys are
about to do And I'm confident I'm I'm
sure their spouses are upset It is risky
to go fly an airplane into enemy
territory and try to get bombs on target
and then get out before you get shot
down And now you have the guy in the
highest position in in DoD is making
that job so much potentially making that
job so much harder for you Um there is
reporting today that he's hired his
brother at the Department of Defense
Pete Hexf to do a liaison I think is uh
what he's doing What's his brother's
background i think he might have had a
podcast company I'm not I don't quote me
on that I think that's what it was Um
yeah this is a guy who said he's going
to bring merit back to the Department of
Defense fired the chair of the Joint
Chiefs because he was too woke I guess
black man who talked about being black
in America And do you think he's
restoring merit to the Department of
Defense with hiring his brother who
probably needed a job or maybe gave him
a raise from his previous job or wants
to have his brother around how could his
brother possibly be the most qualified
job for whatever this is whatever this
job happens to be it's not his brother
If you need somebody in this position
advertise the position and find the most
qualified person This is the Department
of Defense we're talking about This is
the organization that keeps all of us
safe Pete Aseth is routinely putting
American service members and and the
entire country's national security in
jeopardy with his just complete
ineptitude This is not a smart guy
Clearly that continues to play out and
it's time he be held accountable And I
know there were some rumblings at first
in the first signal scandal about maybe
Pete getting the exit getting the stinky
boot out But it seems like that pressure
is really going to start to build Pete
was already doing some firings of his
own I would not be shocked if more
firings came as MAGA starts to eat their
own over these mounting scandals And we
are going to be calling out that every
single day And if you want to support it
as always you can hit that subscribe
button leave a like on this video and if
you stuck around to the end drop a blue
heart in the comments And until next
time I'll see you

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'I’d Fail Him as a Student’: Sachs Publicly Grades Trump’s Trade Illiteracy
Times Now World
731K subscribers
Premiered Apr 15, 2025 #sächsisch #timesnowworld #tnworld

Renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs tore into Donald Trump’s latest tariff threats, branding them “Mickey Mouse economics” and accusing the former president of unleashing chaos on global markets. In a scathing takedown, Sachs said Trump’s trade logic was so flawed that “he wouldn’t pass a basic econ class,” slamming the former president’s obsession with trade deficits as “childish and dangerous.” Sachs blamed Trump’s economic policies for triggering a $10 trillion loss in global wealth, warning that the U.S. is now flirting with authoritarianism under “one-man rule by emergency decree.” Dismissing Trump’s talk of foreign nations “cheating” the U.S., Sachs countered: “It’s not a trade issue—it’s a spending problem.” The blistering critique comes amid rising fears that Trump’s return to power could reignite economic instability worldwide.



Transcript

[Jeffrey Sachs] If you take your credit card and you go shopping and you run up a large
credit card debt you're running a trade deficit with all those
shops Now it would be pretty strange if you then blamed all the shop owners for
having sold you all those things You're ripping me off You're ripping me off You're ripping me off I'm running a
trade deficit That is the level of understanding of the president of the
United States The trade deficit does not
represent at all trade
policies It represents spending relative to production or
earnings We call that an identity I teach it in the second day of my course
in international monetary economics Trump never made it to the second
day So he says "You're running a trade deficit Look they're all cheating me."
But all that's happening is the United States is outspending its national income And you
can look at the national income chart You can add up consumption and
investment and government spending And you can subtract off gross national
product And lo and behold what will that equal not approximately exactly That
will equal the current account deficit which is the comprehensive measure of how much you spend on goods and services
versus how much you uh sell in goods and
services So the United States runs a current account deficit because it
spends more than it produces Why does it do that we have a big credit card in the
United States It's called the national government The US government spends
about $2 trillion a year more than it takes in in revenues What it's doing is
making transfers to the American people and to American businesses It doesn't
tax Americans for those transfers because here's another little fact
Because the congressmen that vote on the budget got into office by being paid for
their campaigns by rich people who don't like taxes So the political system says
"Spend but don't tax us." So we run a chronic deficit in the
United States That spending goes out either as transfer payments or goods and
services And that's more than our national income which is about $30
trillion and our spending is about $31 trillion And that's our trade deficit
And for that Donald Trump blames the world Okay I fail him for this if he
were my student He's my president It's a little
weirder because when he did this in two days the world lost $10
trillion of market capitalization By the way where did it go uh did it get transferred from here
to here no it got destroyed Why destroyed
because trade something also the president of the United States doesn't understand is mutually
beneficial So if you stop trade everybody loses It's not that one side
wins the other side loses He cannot understand that concept as a guy that
traded real estate in New York So his idea is somebody had to win
somebody had to lose But what happened when he made this announcement was $10 trillion was wiped out worldwide It's
not that the US went up and they went down No everybody went down because the
whole world system is based on a division of labor and he's breaking that division of
labor into pieces So then people
said this doesn't make sense Even the very rich people that gave him the money for him to get
into office started saying this doesn't make sense The hedge fund managers who were
his big campaign contributors Elon Musk who paid for his election became prime
minister Uh he said this doesn't make sense And then the markets said this
doesn't make sense not only 10 trillion dollars but as the finance minister said
interest rates started to rise because people began to dump US Treasury debt
the safest thing in the world apparently So interesting what
happened It's not quite true that he reversed things. First he left on this
10% tariff, except for one country, for China,145% where he raised
the tariff rates. That's because the United States has a deep neurotic
attachment to China The US political system hates
China. Why? Because China's big and successful.
And so the US hates it's rival. It's a competitor. And
so this is the one thing he left on. Now he's going to mess up everything with
this too. Because in a trade war between the US and China, China wins. China does
not depend on the US market very much. It's about 12% of China's exports. China
will do just fine. It's just a dumb
policy. There's no more. Sorry to say it. There's just no more explanation
to this than that. It makes no sense

Now
it raises if I could just one last point How can this happen when it makes no
sense and that people should understand we are in oneperson rule in the United
States Our political system is in a state of
collapse What President Trump did is an emergency
decree Everything he does is an emergency decree Literally you can go on
to white house.gov gov and then type follow the menu to executive decrees and
there are dozens of them and each one starts the same way with the powers
invested in in me as president of the United States I hereby declare a
nonsense b nonsense c nonsense because he's
king those powers are not invested in the president of the United ates They're
invested in the Congress You read article 1 section 8 of our constitution
it says that all duties originate with the Congress and specifically in the
lower house All legislation has to start in the House of Representatives
But the US starting in 1945 after World War II
became a military state to a large extent And so it sprinkled in its
legislation emergency emergency emergency And Trump doesn't have to
prove anything's an emergency He just has to says something's an emergency So
suddenly the trade deficit became an emergency And on that basis he issues a
oneperson rule Even his aids don't know what he's doing You raise one final
interesting issue which is that the market recovered about $4 trillion when
he reversed Anyone who knew that 5 minutes before made
billions This is not the cleanest government in the world I can tell you I'd be hugely surprised if some people
didn't know just a bit ahead of time starting with members of the US Congress
By the way look we'll get into the more general issues about protectionism and the end
of globalization question mark in a minute But I think what's happening and the directives coming from the White
House are such a perfect example of what this panel is about I'd just like to stay on this just for a few more minutes
Um Minister is protectionism always a shortterm aim and does it always come at
the expense of the longer term gain donald Trump hasn't said it in public but apparently in private during his
first term he was asked about the problem of the US national debt And his answer was I don't care because I'll be
dead by the time it's a problem And apparently that's also his approach to the climate crisis So is this
protectionism coming from the White House a short-term fix which is going to hurt America in the longer term in terms
of how it grows it's not a fix It's uh apparently a quick fix but it's
fundamentally flawed as professor has very clearly stated Look
protectionism is nothing new If you look at post global financial
crisis the number of annual trade restrictions have gone up
dramatically In fact like last year there were over 3,200 trade
restrictions That is almost 11 times higher than what it was pre- global
financial crisis So this has been a trend
But what has you know what we have seen over the past week or two is clearly a
new level This this goes beyond you know some protectionist measures trade
restrictions This goes into something an allout trade war So that's really
worrisome because if you go back again I mean if you go if you look at 20 years
to global financial crisis global annual trade growth was
two times world real GDP growth rate So in a way trade was the engine of growth
Now that engine has been slow So if you look at post global financial
crisis global trade growth barely kept up with kept up with uh real GDP you
know global GDP growth So that's no longer really one of the kind of like a
strong engine But I think the way things are now if you know if if current state
of affairs is sustained we may end up actually protectionism dragging global
growth It is not only growth it's really there are many you know additional
fallouts from these type of policies Absolutely Yeah Yeah So the answer to
your question this is not a fix This is a fundamentally
flawed you know uh policy perspective Obviously countries have
choice you know they they always have a choice but we would rather you know see
world moving back to rule-based multilateral framework you
know where everyone benefits I think I agree with professor you know over 1
billion people since 1990s have been lifted out of poverty
predominantly in Asia I'm talking about absolute poverty here and that's largely
thanks to you know trade and and growth associated with
that trade So it is worrisome that we are now experimenting
policies that may actually reverse some of these gains which I think were very important
A billion people out of absolute poverty cannot be underestimated
It's quite s now admittedly trade do cause geographic
dislocations but the solution is not protectionism The solution lies more
internal sound policies you know structural remedies but
also you can deploy tax policy incentives and other things to address
you know uh dislocations in regions caused by you know global trade openness
Uh so it's not a level but protectionism will create more inequalities it will
create bigger problems Uh already you've got significant headwinds for global growth
aging population high global indebtness climate impending climate
crisis So protectionism is going to be yet another big blow to long-term growth
outlook And that's why growth is barely you know at you know sustained at
at 3% I think the risk is that we will move to a new era where per capita GDP
growth will almost disappear if we continue down this path
Really interesting what you say about protectionism having fallout in other sectors and we will get on to that about
how it might affect cooperation on the climate crisis global health etc etc But
let's use one country as a particular example about how a nation can react to protectionism So we have the US tariffs
which in 90 days will come into effect beyond the 10% that Donald Trump has placed Let's take two rich countries UK
and Singapore will stay at 10% Bangladesh and Botswana will both go up to
37% Laos will be 48% Syria will be 41%
Lisu in southern Africa will be 50% In 2023 the US exported to Lutu $7.33
million worth of goods Loto in that same year exported to the United States $228
million The US GDP per capita in 2023 was
$82.8,000 per person In Loto it was $916 Gentlemen how does a country like
Nutu deal with the protectionism coming from the US minister
Well uh look protectionism is an external shock
meaning it's not a decision by you know the counterparty It's it's essentially
So how do you deal with it i guess uh you focus on regional integration I mean
as a an antidote of protectionism So regional connectivity regional
integration would be one way forward So you know instead of globalization on a
big scale you focus on how you can deepen and broaden your ties with your
immediate neighborhood or countries that are still willing to entertain
rule-based trade So I think that's the only way Um
uh again this is a major shock for many countries I think global supply chains
are going to suffer Uh this will lead to I mean already I think the risk is that
capital will be misallocated Take us I mean take Turkey for example Uh we have we are the world
second largest of white goods exporter We need chips basic ones
nothing sophisticated We're not talking about four nanometers We're talking about you know 30 40 70
nanometers If we're worried that countries are not going to supply that
uh even though it may not be the most efficient way we may have to go into a
very large capex to see if we could produce them We are good at something Other countries
are better at something So we would rather trade And this is a very simple
you know uh economics you know theory everybody
benefits So I don't think you know X country or Y country they there's not
much they can do except to look at you know ways in which uh they could uh
mitigate the fallout from not being able to sell goods to United States

But professor that takes a long time to arrange because of course the shock is immediate You can't make deals that
quickly can you i think uh the particular uh tariff
rates that Trump announced last week that led to that financial blood bath are not going to come back So I don't
think we're going to hear again about those numbers after 90 days 90 days in
US time now is infinity It's eternity Uh
we'll never hear those numbers again Where did those numbers come from
something again so stupid you can't believe that that any uh country any
country would would do this But the idea is the following As I said if you want to know
what your trade balance is you earn some income So you sell some services to
somebody and you buy things And if you sp if you spend what you earn you're in
trade balance Technically you're in current account balance Now most of us I
work for one employer uh my university So I run a a big trade
surplus with my university And then I run a pretty big uh trade deficit with
uh the grocery store that I we buy our groceries from and if I have to buy
shoes I run a trade deficit with the shoe store and so forth Trump's
idea just to add to the craziness of it is that you should run a trade balance
with everybody Not an overall trade balance but a trade balance with everybody So you should sell a little
bit You should work a little bit for your shoe store You should work a little bit for your grocery store You should uh
you should go around anytime you want to shop you trade something I'll you know I'll write you an essay if you'll sell
me shoes and you make your living uh somehow trying to balance your trade
with all of your counterparts Well this is insane This is why we have a market economy You don't have to have balance
with every transaction that you do with somebody And but what Trump said was "Oh
lutu they sell us more than uh we buy from them so they're cheating us
That's literally what he said Literally what he
said Okay Is it completely delusional or
rhetoric it's delusional Okay Just so you know Uh it's weird But anyway now
then he calculated a formula Okay Lutu we have to tax them by the amount to
reduce the imports from them so that we have balance with lutu And then they made some absolutely
stupid formula that you would not accept in a firstear third week class It came
out of the US trade representatives office They probably were told do it overnight The boss wants it And then
they came up with a list of tariffs country by country based on the bilateral trade balance You cannot make
this stuff up This is not a It used to be not a Mickey Mouse country my
country But this is Mickey Mouse This is not And I'm sorry I apologize to Mickey
Mouse He would not do this Mickey Mouse is smarter than this So we are in a crazy land actually
with this Now it stopped for a moment We'll never hear those numbers again I
don't know what we'll hear in 3 months God help us really because it probably
won't have to do with trade It'll have to do with something else But we can't normalize this as what's
the rationale how to negotiate what to do Of course 60 countries immediately
said "We'll rebalance with you." And the president of the United
States literally used the language I'm about to use -- I'm quoting him because otherwise I would never say this -- He said
"60 countries are coming to kiss my ass." He said that in a public speech
the president of the United States. So this is, I'm sorry, I apologize,
but it's presidential language. I'm sorry, okay, I'm only speaking at high political
terms. So we cannot normalize
this. We have to say no. We didn't
spend a hundred years, 200 years,
27 years since David Ricardo put forward the idea of comparative advantage, okay?
And we have been building the trade system since the ruins of World War II,
for 80 years. And we have been building the World Trade Organization, which the US
led the creation of, I think it's fair to say for 31
years. This should not be normalized, to try to figure out what is the theory of
this. And it's a more fundamental point ladies and gentlemen. The United States
is a rogue nation right, now on many things, not just on trade, but on making
Gaza into the US Riviera. It's a
little bit of a rogue nation for the world to hold together. The rest of the
world has to say, "We're not going down crazy lane. We're going to be responsible
We're going to go to the UN. We're going to go to the World Trade Organization.
We're not going to get into this downward spiral, because if we normalize
craziness, there is no way out."

Uh you mentioned Mickey Mouse but
there's a kind of a theme here from Bloomberg the news agency These are its headlines in the morning and the
afternoon of Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday Tuesday morning this is madness
In the afternoon a clown show On Wednesday stocks keep falling In the
afternoon could have been worse Thursday morning assessing the damage Thursday afternoon Trump blinks.

[Jeffrey Sachs] And by the way, if I may, because it's interesting because I'm living in this crazy world, the Secretary of Treasury
then, with all deference to a person who has a very hard job, he says this was
planned all along when Trump dropped this. Can you imagine?

He couldn't say
anything else, though.

[Jeffrey Sachs] Well, yeah, I know. But to hear this from your Treasury Secretary is not also reassuring, cuz all
you hear is a crazy land, rather than what we need to hear which is
rationality.

Okay So let's make it more general for the moment And by the way ladies and gentlemen in the audience
I'll give you a few minutes at the end if you want to ask our two panelists a question We'll try to get a few questions in from the audience So to
broaden it out Minister as the professor says and pretty much everybody agrees protectionism doesn't make economic
sense because in the longer term it's going to cost everybody So what's driving increasing protectionism not
just in the United States but in other nations as well because if it doesn't make economic sense does it mean it then
becomes a political statement from the person uh imposing that protectionism uh
to almost appear as like a nationalist moment to bring people towards that
decision maker politically rather than economically
well it's easy to explain I think what is driving the
current you know uh what seems like a fundamentally
flawed policies is first of all let's set the scene I
mean there's a geostrategic competition between China and United States we know
that um China has what it takes to become a
superpower because it has human capital it as state-of-the-art infrastructure
and now it's catching up in technology United States consider itself
as the hedgeimon power So we know from history there's
always been tensions between existing superpowers and emerging ones
uh it doesn't have to end this way meaning in a trade war or any other
force but it does in the past I mean history tells us that is you know we
more frequently see tensions rather than cooperation so what lies behind this
very simple go back to 20 years ago roughly speaking China accounts for about 8% of
global manufacturing Today China accounts for more than 30%
of global manufacturing Who lost ground united
States European Union and Japan United
States clearly also sees this Again go back to 20 years ago and just visualize
a world map Um which country
commands as the main trading partner of the rest of the world maps are all over
the place Clearly it was United States 20 years ago Today it's China
Now normally uh what you would the way you would
respond the way I would respond is that look we need sound policies structure
reforms to regain ground Instead it looks like this rivalry
combined with lack of obviously clear understanding is that it leads to to go
after quick fixes Mhm And quick fixes which is also to do with populism
nationalism is to blame others and is to present it in a simple
fashion The reality is you have to be more competitive You know you have to invest
in upskilling reskilling your population you have to invest in your
infrastructure and you have to you know there's a lot of I mean there's a long
list of homework but those are politically difficult to deliver they take time and they're difficult so
structural policy has been lacking in most countries and when you can't deliver
structural transformation then you go either you rely on monetary policy to fix
things You know monetary policy in many parts of the developed world have been
doing the heavy lifting over the last couple of decades in the face of
difficulties So my point here is that I think we know what drives it is
losing ground But how do you regain ground again the sophisticated way would be to
do the right thing and deliver on reforms The easy way would be to blame
everyone else and come up with high tariffs as a
fix Uh let's see Um okay so
protectionism is also not helping your friends to concentrate more on yourself
rather than the outside world We know that the dramatic drastic cuts to USID
the Agency for International Development has already or is going to cost lives
Myanmar's recent earthquake the Americans have been for
decades maybe the most important first responder sending hundreds of rescue
workers They sent three administrators They didn't send a single rescue worker
They laid off recently some people working for the federal government on uh
the US nuclear program They realized very quickly within a couple of days that it was actually a national security
issue So they were told to come back to their office The office said sorry they've been uh excluded from their
federal email so we can't get in touch with them So they couldn't remploy them Professor Saxs when you were president
of the Earth Institute at Columbia University it focuses I've got to read this from the notes It focuses on
sustainable development this institute at Colombia including research in climate change geology global health
economics management agriculture ecosystems urbanization energy water
everything that we need to live So how does protectionism affect these
kinds of relationships between one country and another country
yeah I I want to answer that by uh continuing on with the brilliant
explanation that that the minister just gave about the hard stuff and the and
the easy stuff Yeah So uh just to say in American politics the swing states in the
presidential elections in the last uh three elections in particular have been
the Midwestern states Uh so those are states like Michigan Indiana Illinois
Ohio Pennsylvania Wisconsin Minnesota These are states that can go either way
And those states did suffer a decline of employment in
manufacturing not only or even mainly because of trade but also heavily
because of automation over the last 40 years I come from Detroit which is uh
Motor City used to be Uh and uh I used to go uh when young on school field
trips to see the assembly lines and there were actually workers on the assembly line But now if you go to an
automotive plant it's all robots Very very few people inside That's not
because the jobs went overseas in that case That's because uh the assembly line
itself became an automated phenomenon So Trump is
giving an answer to those swing states It's China's fault It's Mexico's fault
It's Lutu's fault What the minister said is really
important that when he said that trade benefits the economy but it could hurt
some sectors And what you do is not stop the trade but you make sure that you pull
everyone along Maybe in a regional policy or maybe uh in job reskilling or
maybe in some other kind of public investment or education policy
Here's where the US really failed over the last 40 years We let the
inequalities widen and widen partly because of automation partly because
jobs did go overseas but for the right reason They had comparative advantage in
in those jobs Skilled people got better and better salaries Lower skilled people
had their living standards fall The gap widened By the way not just the income
gap the life expectancy became 10 years or more So many of our
epidemics so many of our social problems relate to this widening inequality The
United States political system didn't address it at all for 40 years And that
comes to what I mentioned the corruption of the political system When part candidates of both political parties are
paid by rich donors for their reelection campaigns and both parties then become
the agents of tax cuts and uh and and
no really addressing the social conditions You end up with a Donald
Trump coming in and selling a pseudo explanation It's all China and
selling a pseudo remedy a trade war What the auto workers are going to learn
right now is they're they're going to lose jobs by even the tariffs that have
been put in place because we need the intermediate parts brought in from elsewhere Now they face higher costs And
the United States can't compete at all with Chinese electric vehicles China The
United States has basically handed China the electric vehicle market for the next 20 years So did Europe by the way Europe
delayed the transformation to electric vehicles said "We produce great internal
combustion engines We're going to continue to do that." The world actually needs electric vehicles because of the
climate crisis So all of this is to say the real hard work is to think ahead Mhm
The country by the way in my experience of working all over the world in the
last 40 years that thinks the head that thinks ahead the most is China China's
success is not random China's success actually is a lot of
forwardlooking planning In 2014 China issued a document called made
in China 2025 And it wasn't a protectionist policy It
was we need to invest in the technology so we can be at the forefront I think in
eight of the 10 sectors that were identified there China succeeded in reaching the forefront In 2017 China
made a plan for artificial intelligence This is already eight years ago Deep
Seek didn't just come out of nowhere It came out of a long-term strategy So this
is hard work that actually pays off This is what every government should do This
is what every country should do is look ahead Now you mentioned very interesting
idea We we got a president who doesn't understand
and maybe doesn't care about the future in the same way But just to say the
biggest issue on the planet should be the climate crisis not all the things
we're endlessly talking about And every part of the world is going to suffer
terribly by what has been built in in terrible very dangerous climate change
It's it's out of the headlines But you know I had a
very difficult job I was the director of an institute
with 300 climate scientists for 14 years Some of the world's leading climate
scientists The reason it was a hard job is that every week they came up and told
me it's worse than we thought They would give me
endlessly grim news And the lead climate
scientist at Columbia University is a man named James Hansen who I regard as
the world's leading climate scientist And he produced a study in
January that said "It's much worse than we have thought The world's temperature
has gone up by.3° C in 3 years We have had 21 months
of the last 22 above 1.5° That's the new baseline by the way
That's not because of an El Nino effect That's the new baseline We already blew
the limit that we set 10 years ago in Paris that we said we would not exceed
We're already above it and what Hansen says is we're rising at an accelerating
rate Now it's the average rate is probably between.3 and point4 degrees
Celsius per decade now on average So we'll be at 2° excess What all of this
means is profound danger 20 years from now 25 30 but we're already seeing
terrible danger today It's I don't want to minimize what's already happening Los Angeles burned down Massive forest fires
in Korea last week It's everywhere I'm My wife and I are non-stop traveling
Every single place we go is some kind of climate crisis literally in some it's a drought it's
floods it's heat waves it's pest infestations it's forest fires and the
sea level is going to rise by many meters which is not great for a stumble
by the way and not great for coastal areas It's very dangerous what is built
into the system Now what is Trump's answer for this yesterday King Donald issued an
executive decree to bring back
coal It's willful destruction of well-being
Willful And that is again he pulled out of the Paris agreement What I'm hoping
ladies and gentlemen is the other 192
members of the UN have to say "No we're
not entering a crazy land We're going to take care of our future." Right now I
live in a crazy land but the rest of the world has to avoid the crazy land has to
avoid normalizing this I don't know if any of you saw it during the height of the coronavirus pandemic
an Australian artist uh cartoonist drew a cartoon which had the first tidal wave
kind of for tsunami of um economic recession There was a bigger tidal wave
tsunami behind it which was COVID 19 and then a huge one over both of them which
was the climate crisis So get ready I'll give you a chance to ask a few questions but I just wanted to address one final
issue to the minister And I was getting a bit depressed professor when you were talking about that I tell my kids since
they were born they're now 21 and 19 live anywhere you want in the world but don't live near the coast or near a
river Um the professor is saying that the climate crisis is going to be one of probably I'm kind of you know putting
words into your mouth professor that del globalization if it becomes more and more of a popular sentiment and policy
the climate crisis will uh be affected because of a lack of cooperation through del globalization Minister what other
big dangers do you see if the trend of delobalization gathers pace
well as I mentioned earlier in addition to the impending
climate crisis which could have a devastating impact on the future of
humanity you know I think we are faced with significant headwinds
uh that already exist uh but some of them could become more complicated
One of them is high global indebtness Mhm If
protectionism you know uh clearly goes the way it is today meaning
if we really go into these trade wars and if this leads to higher
inflation even for a couple of years if that's the case then that means
long-term interest rates are likely to rise And if that is so then many countries
are already struggling to manage the debt service You know global indebtness if
you look at it overall indebtness was 328% last year 328% of GDP Yeah this is
huge When interest rates are very low but when rates go up
clearly that's a big issue I mean look at you know look at the Turkish
scene Um yes we've had a you know domestic
uh you know I mean domestic issue that led to some market
turbulence But what happened post April 2 CDS have gone through the roof CDS are
country risk premium you know our external bond deals 10 year five year
they all gone up significantly on the back of these tariffs
I think there are already many countries according to UN that pay more
in on interest on debt than what they you know are able to earmark for
education and health care combined so I I think you know we
already have issues such as indebtness that could that the current you know
trend could exacerbate I mean aging population already is could create huge
constraints on public finances going forward Um so those are some of the
additional headwinds that exist that could actually serve as speed limit or a
drag on growth So I think you know the world and I agree with professor that um
the world has to you know rather than going you know down this path we need to
cooperate more We need to work more closely on climate change on how to
address other problems because protectionism will also lead to probably
global inequalities You know if you don't allow AI
chips to be freely available to everyone clearly that's a big issue
because then many countries will be left behind in terms of tapping this you know
AI that has immense potential to boost productivity You know protectionism is
not limited to trade of goods and service it's now associated with financial
flaws you know with diffusion of technologies through
FDI So clearly um I think we'll be worse off unless we
cooperate unless we return to multilateralism Uh but sadly right now
it's all about shift to minilateralism You know a few countries
getting together but that's not enough I think um issues are too big for few
countries to address I think you know the rest of the world should come
together So yes there are significant challenges Uh when you mentioned aging population I have a good example from
Europe that only two countries on the entire continent are having enough babies to sustain their population level
That's Ireland and Portugal So you imagine the pressure on the taxation system and the spending on those other
countries that are not sustaining their population levels and are just getting older and older and older Okay let me
look at the back as well if anybody has any questions We've got about 7 minutes left and please make it a question not a
lecture because if it's a lecture I'll have to stop you Gentleman over there and gentleman over here Okay please
introduce Oh there's a microphone Thank Thank you very much
Doesn't work Yeah does work Okay thank you very much
Uh I have a question for Mr Jeffrey Saxs Uh my name is Sarcer and I'm from Haraj
News Um so you mentioned that we shouldn't look for a rationale behind
the actions of Donald Trump But just just to be a devil's advocate I just I
want to understand their point of view which they mention yes trade deficit and the national debt of the United States
but also they mention the hard industries that left United States back in the day So uh what I'm trying to
understand is uh if United States gets into a confrontation with global powers
such as China or Russia or any other state maybe even Europe one day uh is it wrong for them to want their hard
industries back and this is their rationale to put these tariffs on because Donald Trump mentioned that uh
we are buying cars from Canada that we could have been producing uh before So
uh is there a rationale behind at least on the hard industry part okay thank you
Yeah you know in in trade theory or trade concept there is the national
security rationale Uh so you may want to procure domestically to have a an
armament industry That's quite different from imposing tariffs on 150 countries in a
completely arbitrary way In fact the right policy might be local procurement
from domestic industry that has nothing to do with trade policy at all
So that is not an argument for what he's
doing But I would add one more point We don't need an arms race and we
don't need a war Actually diplomacy is really cheap
compared to war That's why we're at the Antalya diplomacy forum not the Antalya
military forum Uh so if Trump really wanted to save some money we
have almost 800 overseas military
bases in 80 countries This is crazy
So if you wanted to save money and be close the budget deficit I would close
hundreds and hundreds of military bases and leave all these countries at peace because
wherever there's an American military base there's a big headache Believe me
sir Okay Is your question to the finance minister is your question to the finance minister
or to the professor because I want to even things up I would come back to you if it was for the professor But if you
Okay let's address it to the finance
minister 1212 Uh my name is Realel Miller Uh formerly of the OECD formerly
of UNESCO and formerly an adviser to finance ministers So I can address my question to a finance minister One of
the things that's tremendously tempting and it was really in part part of what the last question was about was the hard industries right so now let's go back to
being an extractive economy coal mining you know uh be in Canada I'm Canadian
originally beaver skins right that we sent over so resources right now we have seen in the past historically when there
was a move from natural resources to manufacturing it was quite difficult for the society and the politics to change
because the oligarchs of resources is we're not the oligarchs of manufacturing So I have a question which relates to
the historical context we're in What if we're moving to intangible economies what if we're moving away from tangibles
in general and those robots are going to take care of producing intangibles how do we talk to people who are nervous and
worried because they're accustomed i go to Germany and I say "Can Germany be rich without producing cars?" And they
go "Never." I said "Could could the could Britain be rich without producing coal never." And so we have this
historical difficulty of making the transition And I wonder what you can say in a country like Turkey where you are
making the transition through industry and China through catchup and convergence But can we begin to talk
about going beyond the tangible economy of course we can imagine because
if you look at last couple of hundred years there has been significant you
know trends I mean if I'm not mistaken if you go back to 200 years ago 90% of
employment was in agriculture Today in developed west it's about 1% 2% Uh but
but we are much better off So I think we can uh
extrapolate it's true that uh you know we may achieve artificial general
intelligence soon meaning within a year or two and according to exports maybe
artificial super intelligence within 5 years and assuming that also gets
converted in robotics and advanced manufacturing chances are the
traditional employment will no longer be there So we have to come up with obvious
So that's why I think you know it seems like today's debate considering what is
ahead of us a bit outdated So I I I I hear what you're
asking and it's really complicated We all have to think I remember attending a
global economic symposium in KE uh back in 2007 and one of the session because I
was finance minister and you know well treasury they put me in that session in that panel and the question was
uh when do we start taxing robots so look uh yes I I do see that
happening I don't have the answer but certainly we have to think about it It'll be interesting to know if a robot
will need a work permit as well right okay that that's it The time is up
ladies and gentlemen And it was always going to be too brief with these two particular gentlemen

[admin]

Part 1 of 2

'We’re Governed by Lobbyists, Not Lawmakers', Sachs Slams Trump's Pay-to-Play Politics
by Professor Jeffrey Sachs
Times Now World
Premiered Apr 21, 2025 #timesnowworld #tnworld #newsworld

Renowned economist and Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs delivered a sweeping critique of U.S. foreign and domestic policy during a public conversation at the Asia Society, accusing Washington of sabotaging global peace, provoking the Ukraine war, and operating a corrupt, militarized system of governance. Sachs said the United States has not had a functioning political system for three decades, and described Donald Trump as a “mad king” whose administration is run by improvisation and billionaires like Elon Musk. Citing his own role as an advisor during the Soviet collapse, Sachs said the U.S. rejected cooperation in favor of hegemony, triggering decades of unnecessary wars and escalating confrontations with Russia and China. He warned that Trump may attempt to militarily occupy Greenland and dismantle civilian government, while dismissing American claims to a rules-based order as “hypocritical” and “self-serving.” #tnworld #timesnowworld #worldnews #internationalnews #timesnews #newsworld



Transcript

[Jeffrey Sachs] Thank you Ronnie and thank you for uh continuing our our conversation which
we began in December and I know we have some future uh events together as well
Yes Uh he will be the speaker of the Asia Business Council in New Delhi next month Yeah And our ex the ex executive
director Janet Pow is here Oh good Yes Together with your friend John Whitehead
I'm one of the founders F I know that So uh this this is a a wonderful work in
progress this discussion because every day brings new interesting things to talk about uh usually during the day
about six interesting things Uh and that's part of the problem uh right now
which is we have a hyperactive Washington um that is uh little bit
confused in what it's doing and uh not really so much wanting to think
carefully about what it's doing So this is really the problem Although I
understand that Donald Trump actually share a lot of your view which is a minority view so far uh he shared a
couple of my uh videos which I thought was a a good sign but um I'm not sure if
it's a sign of anything actually consistently Um but we're we're still
waiting to see This is the the early days of the administration I've not been
a happy camper about the United States for a while So this is not in in any way
partisan or particular to the Trump administration To my mind
the United States has been u not the most constructive actor uh in the world
scene for several decades actually uh I
have been a bit chagrined uh really for 30 years about American foreign policy
and mostly because I saw at a very personal way and also a professional way
how many opportunities for peace the US uh squandered uh needlessly Uh I was an
advisor 35 years ago to President Gorbachov uh on the economic reforms of
the last moments of the Soviet Union And uh when the Soviet Union went down
President Yelson asked me to be an economic advisor for his economic team I
can tell you without question without any doubt whatsoever 35 years ago we had the
chance for sustained peace in this world without any fundamental conflicts The
Russian leadership absolutely wanted it They sought it They wanted it in a very
practical way And the problem from my perspective which I only understood step
by step over many years is that the United States didn't want cooperation It
just wanted victory Uh it wanted its way It wanted what came to be called the
unipolar world uh the idea that with the Soviet Union gone and China not on anyone's radar
screen back in the 1990s in geopolitical terms uh the United States ran the show
so they thought And I basically lived through
professionally close up more than 30 years of the United States trying to run
the show and it has not gone well It's been non-stop wars Uh it has been
unnecessary provocations In the case of uh
Russia I'm a definitely a strong minority view together with my friend uh
John Mirshimer that uh what happened in Ukraine was basically provoked by the
United States over many years I saw a lot of it close up The war in Ukraine could have been
avoided easily on countless occasions right it could have ended immediately in
March 2022 because it there was actually a peace agreement that was on the verge
of being signed and the United States stopped that too So these are tragic uh
mistakes of foreign policy when it comes to China I am of the view for those of
you who have uh happened to see me in one way or another on on video for
example I'm basically of the view that uh sorry
my let me just turn off my phone I'm basically of the view that
China's big mistake visav the United States was to be too successful uh and
that China has not done anything in my view and I mean anything uh other than
what a normal major country would do to provoke the kinds of reactions and
attitudes from the United States that what happened in the US was that with
China's rise starting around 2014 in a very methodical way the United States
came to view China as not only a rival but therefore as an adversary because it
was a rival in scale in success in technology and what the United States
wanted was primacy or hegemony or
unipolarity and that all of what has happened is basically a an American
reaction to China's success If you want to see that very well
documented I'm sure many of you know the paper but there's a very very clear
vivid explanation of American foreign policy in a paper in
2015 for the Council on Foreign Relations by Robert Blackill and Ashley
Telus called something like a grand strategy towards China or revised grand strategy
towards China And it spells out in completely vivid
terms what has ensued for the past decade because what Blackwell who was my
colleague at Harvard for many years and a friend and a very uh smart person but
I disagree with him on the most basic point What he writes in that 2015 paper
is that America's grand strategy is primacy and China's rise is therefore no
longer in America's interest This is an astounding idea It's
basically the idea that success elsewhere is disadvantageous for the
United States If you take that view you are bound to live in a world of non-stop
conflict If the advances of other places
are to your detriment simply because they are advances you are condemned to view the
world in conflictual terms But Blackwell says in the first sentences of this
essay America's grand strategy has always been to be number one and
therefore China's rise is not in America's interest And what he and his
co-authors spell out is a list of eight or 10 specific steps We should make
trade arrangements that exclude China This is extraordinary Uh this is
what President Obama tried to do with TPP We will have a trade arrangement in
Asia without China Duh
Sorry Look at a map Look at some data This is not a good
idea And the list goes on Build up the military around China's
perimeter Not a good idea for peace Put on barriers to export of technology I'm
talking about 2015 This already started 10 years ago
And what's very interesting about the Council on Foreign Relations documents is that they are not statements of views
They are explanations for the uh community of the council of US policy
So this was not a view of black will what should be done This was a
description of what American policy would be and it's been carried out
pretty much systematically since then So if you point these things out you're
viewed as a little bit uh impolite in Washington So my uh lack of welcome to
Washington goes back many years But I can tell you the feeling is
reciprocated I don't even want to go to Washington So I don't except on very
rare occasions because there's nothing to do there It's not constructive You're
not going to find answers There's no one really to talk to There is a view Well
that brings us up to the current situation because things are
changing but it's quite complicated how they're changing I don't think they're
changing in a stable direction uh or a stable approach There's one thing that I
very much appreciate of what President Trump is doing which is to try to end
the war in Ukraine I think the war will end because it can't really continue
without American support of Ukraine And I believe despite an administration that
reverses policies by the hour that there won't be a reversal of US policy visav
Ukraine because no segment of Trump's
movement has any interest in putting more funding into Ukraine And the fact
of the matter is while the early days of the Trump administration have been
consumed with foreign issues the next months will be consumed with domestic
fiscal issues and asking for more money for Ukraine would be deeply perturbing
to a very uh unpopular fiscal agenda
that Trump is going to push through successfully in the next months and
supporting Ukraine would prevent that from happening That's the only part of the
Trump agenda I like So they don't like me probably
although I have some friends inside the government and and had friends inside
the previous administration and the one before that and the one before that
But we're seeing in other parts of the world tremendous
uh instability and lack of strategy in
the Middle East Basically it's a unfortunately and to my chagrin it is
probably a doubling down of the US uh
backing of Israeli mayhem which I regard as a genocide and I regard as absolutely
destructive of peace in the region But I don't see Trump changing
that It's still early days He once did tweet something of me calling Netanyahu
an sob and um Trump posted that and then
there were headlines in Israel for about three days What did he mean by that uh
but apparently not a lot because in the last days were back to Netanyahu's wars
everywhere war in uh in Gaza war in the West Bank war in Lebanon war in Syria
war in Yemen and what Netanyahu wants is a war with Iran which could be a world
ender Actually I don't think we'll go to war with Iran but the Israeli mayhem is
not being stopped by Trump It's actually rhetorically being encouraged by Trump
So that's a big disappointment for me when it comes to uh trade I don't have to say more than
Trump is uniting the world uh because there is uh not a single place
in the world that is uh satisfied with this new tariff regime including
inside the United States uh it has succeeded in uh in uh stopping the stock
market rally and reversing it It succeeded in lowering uh uh automobile
company share prices yesterday I didn't check today but down 5% yesterday uh
when the automotive tariffs were issued It's a completely ignorant economic
policy as far as I'm concerned We can talk about it but I see no merit
whatsoever on any count to the protectionism that Trump is trying to uh
bring about Um so there the whole world is unhappy
about it Um and then when it comes to Asia we'll discuss
this Probably Trump and the administration probably
want to avoid open conflict with China Whether they are clever enough to
do so I'm not sure But there'll be a lot of noise and instability I predict I'll
make a prediction that is clear and therefore could be completely proved
wrong soon I don't believe there will be any grand bargain or any great agreement
between the United States and China on on anything for years to come because I
think the US administration is too unstable for anything like that because
any serious agreements [Music] require consideration and strategy I for
one don't believe that we have any of that in Washington now Uh I think we have
improvisation no role of Congress uh basically a one-man show uh executive
orders mostly illegal uh court uh uh court challenges that are proliferating
by the day Uh so I think it's a mess not not a strategy
Um well I hope that explains why I'm not welcome in Washington
I don't think I would let you eat too much Uh Jeff afterwards I'll take you to McDonald's
Uh just a couple of uh questions So where do you think America is is heading
i agree with you from my personal perspective that America has been more wrong than right in terms of its foreign
policy for a for the last couple of decades So where do you think America is
heading um let's not forget the domestic issues and the domestic issue I I I I've
written about this that the United States cannot beat China I'm trying to give them a few minutes to eat Uh the
United States cannot beat China China for sure cannot beat America So it's not a matter of who will win It's a matter
of who will not lose And if anybody loses I don't think it
will be because of the other party but rather it will be because of the domestic situation I don't know if you
agree with that So how do you see the American America's domestic situation
after all you are an economist by training and of course you have gone into many other things So tell us
the US uh does not have a functioning political
system uh and has not had a functioning political system
for 30 years or so And [Music] the this is very interesting American
society really has great strengths many centers of capacity in business in
academia in civil society And so even though our political
system has badly malfunctioned the country has done okay for the last 30
years other than troubles caused by uh directly these foreign policy disasters
But the country and the economy has gone on Many important innovations have
occurred Uh many great discoveries have occurred in in the academic community
and scientific community So you see a country with great strengths But for me
the uh remarkable fact is how poorly the
political system has functioned consistently for 30 years And I've tried
to understand that and my conclusion is that there are two things deeply wrong
with the American political system One is that it became a payfor-play
political system to a shocking extent This what a pay payforplay that it
became a corrupt political system in which campaign contributions translated into public policy And this was not
always the case Uh the role of lobbying changed in the United
States starting systematically in the 1970s and there were a series of Supreme
Court rulings The most famous of which is Citizens United in which
the conservative Supreme Court ruled that limits on campaign
financing were simply unconstitutional because the idea was
and the judges were very explicit about it giving for campaigns is speech and
free speech predominates any interest in limiting campaign
financing This was a doctrine put forward by one judge Lewis Powell And
it's a very interesting history because Lewis Powell was a a corporate lawyer Uh
he worked with the US Chamber of Commerce and in the late 60s and early
70s He said inside the business community all of this environmental
regulation and Ralph Nater and consumer
interest groups this is killing us The business community has to retake
politics And uh on that basis a famous memo that he wrote uh he caught the
attention of Richard Nixon who put him on the Supreme Court And a few years
after that he wrote the first opinion ending limits on corporate campaign
contributions It was a concerted strategy and several decisions basically
eliminated any boundaries of giving it When you do this you reach a kind of
caricature Elon Musk is a caricature of this the richest person in the world who
funds the campaign of the presidential candidate and who says to Congress
anyone that steps out of line I fund opponents to defeat you And so you can't
get more vivid in the bureaucratic element than having Elon Musk as your
prime minister which is his informal position right now And this is how
American politics really degenerated terribly over a 30-year
period I once was in the presence of a Democratic Party member of Congress and
I asked her about some terrible decision Congress made on
health care costs and she literally put her face in her hands and said the
lobbies the lobbies It became overwhelming the money play
And because of this all of the issues of American society of inequality of the widening gaps between
different classes in America of the uh growth of the poor underclass of the
epidemics of deaths of despair that you all know about which are very serious
afflictions of American society Not one of them was addressed in public policy
There has been no effort once in 30 years to address inequality in the
United States to address we have an epidemic of uh opioids and everything
else Who gets blamed china of course China Fentinel Fentinyl precursors Who
takes the opioids it's the Americans So this this is an example Climate
change is another example We have not had one consistent policy on climate
change for 40 years because of the big oil lobby It's not even
subtle And there was a very humorous sting by a kind of
Greenpeace organization which called the Exxon Mobile lobbyist and said "We're
headhunting We think you could be senior position We" And so they filmed the
Exxon Mobile lobbyist uh in a fake job
interview and they asked him "How do you operate?" And he said "It's easy Uh if
any trouble arises for the industry I just call our senator Who's your senator
joe Mansion Of course Joe Mansion is the senator was the senator from West Virginia He owned two coal companies
personally That was the family wealth And he was basically there in his
position to block any climate change action for 30 years So that was one
thing that broke American politics It just stopped being representative of
basic issues And till this day if you observe the Trump administration there's
not a single moment of discussion about poor people about their needs about the
role of government In fact the whole attempt in the next few months will be
to destroy any public services for the poor especially health care It's amazing
But this is Elon Musk running the show He doesn't have to worry about his health care costs So this is one point
The second point that destroyed American politics was the security state We
became a national security state back
in 1945 essentially after World War II and especially in
1947 with the National Security Act which established the CIA and the Defense Department and the
other institutions of the security state America has as everybody knows very
well military bases in 80 countries around the world Can you imagine never
in history with the even the British Empire of course it was a different era
didn't quite have this And so this is American government is a military
machine all over the world plus a secret army the CIA whose job it is to
overthrow governments that are deemed to be enimical to US interests And the CIA
has engaged in probably about a hundred regime change operations around the
world since 1947 I've seen some of them with my own eyes
Literally the CIA carrying off heads of government One was Aristed who I advised
from Haiti and they took him away in an unmarked plane and flew him to central
central African Republic in broad daylight And by the way when they
overthrew him the New York Times wouldn't even run a story about it because this is how the security state
operates It wasn't deemed to be newsworthy that the United States or it
wasn't deemed to be deemed to be fit to print let me say that the United States
had overthrown a government in our hemisphere Of course it had done that
repeatedly but when I called the reporter she told me that the editor was not interested in the
story Okay My point is that the government you can't run a
democracy and a security state the same way Eisenhower told us that on January
17th 1961 when he said "Beware the military-industrial complex." Believe me
since then it has only grown to gargantuan
proportions If you look at this leak three days ago of the attack on the
Houthis okay there are several notable things about it First they behave like
14y olds up to and including the emojis Okay these are children
Second as they noted uh this has nothing to do with the Houthis This is to send a
message Third they applauded when they destroyed a building that supposedly
included some target but it killed 50 civilians and it was all muscles and
American flags Fourth this was
decided in a completely haphazard way by the White House Congress had no role
There was no discussion of it Fifth the only thing that the
politicians find odd about this whole episode not the bombing of a country in
which we are not at war not the killing of civilians not the fact that this was
a I can't use the right words because they're not proper for polite company
but not the way to do this They can't figure out that something's
wrong All they care about is that it breached secrecy You know what that's the least
interesting part of this The fact that you have secrecy that
enables random killings of this sort on a routine basis is what's wrong We
should be applauding the break of the secrecy but the only thing the Congress
and the press itself talk about is the secrecy element They don't talk about
how wrong it is to be bombing people They don't talk about the fact that the
reason for the war in Yemen is that there's no solution to the Palestine
issue no substance just a war
machine So these to my mind are the two fundamental failures of the United
States We don't have a functioning political system It doesn't address real
needs It enables one person to decide we're not
part of the Paris climate agreement It enables one person to break apart the
international trading system This is extraordinary If you think about it
tariffs by the way under the US Constitution are the responsibility of
Congress because tax authority going back hundreds of years in British
constitutional rule are in the domain of the Parliament or the the House of
Commons That's where Parliament came from which was to limit the tax authority hundreds of years ago
No congressman is objecting to Trump unilaterally setting
tariffs How is he doing that by the way it's completely unconstitutional in
substance He's doing it because we have emergency legislation that allows the
president of the United States to declare a national emergency So the
tariffs on China are under a fentinel emergency Can you imagine how artificial
that is how bogus that is how it has nothing to do with the issues at hand
but also how not a single member of Congress stands up and says you're taking our authority If we had a
functioning Congress a congressman would stand up and say this is our responsibility You
cannot appropriate the voice of the people This
is what revolutions are supposed to be about That the king of England could not
set taxes on the colonies That's how we started Now we have a mad king who sets
taxes day by day and Congress has no interest in even intervening in that
subject So this is the essential problem The country works fine on areas where
you don't need a government but it fails on every area
where you do Our infrastructure fails the inequalities the environment the
environmental protection all of it is failing badly because we don't have a
functioning government in the United States Uh Jeff more reasons why they don't like
me in Washington Jeff you have been a friend for many
years Um Sonia is uh is not the biggest lady
I've seen And is your life ever at risk
i'm just asking on behalf of others May maybe from Sonia
then you're in good shape But but I don't think so I I I think the capacity
of the US government to utterly ignore me is inexhaustible Uh and uh that is actually
in in my view really the truth If I were a student on a student visa I
would be dragged out of our house no doubt because that's what's happening to our students right now day by
day Uh I don't know what will happen in the US in general It could get worse Uh it
it really could get worse I've used since I've been in China for
the last week I have used semjocularly but not
entirely the cultural revolution meme We are in a bit of a cultural revolution in
the United States Uh it's played as culture wars but basically we have a
leader who wants to destroy parts of government This is clear this is
uh Elon is doing doing that work What the real purpose is is not completely
clear Maybe I'll just mention uh actually one very important point to
understand I think everybody knows it but let me emphasize it
One of the core points of failure of politics in the United States is the
budget Because if you are governed by lobbying and by campaign
contributions you cannot have an effective fiscal policy On the one hand you have a
population which votes and so you need somehow to not have complete turmoil And
so you can't really cut so far social security for example You have not been
able to cut Medicare or Medicaid You can't stop paying interest
on the debt And they don't want to stop the military
which is about 3 and a half to 4% of GDP if you include everything If you take
those items the pensions and including the various kinds of pensions including
veterans benefits and the health care uh
and the interest on the debt and the military you have uh roughly 20% of GDP
in spending Our taxes are around 16% of GDP at the federal
level So you start out even before you have any domestic programs at all with a
deficit of about 4% of GDP Now in
our lobbyun politics the first rule is don't raise taxes
So the taxes especially on wealthy people So the highest goal in fiscal
policy of the Trump administration is to extend the low taxes that were voted 10
years ago uh on corporate taxes which have basically been gutted We don't
collect corporate tax except in a very small amount now And they want to extend
that Now our budget deficit is includes
some public services also some little bit for infrastructure which
is falling apart a tiny bit for housing some for labor some for
education and that adds up to roughly another 3% of GDP if you include
everything the judicial system the public administration all the infrastructure
all the environment national science foundation everything except the
military the pension the health care costs the interest costs
and a couple of other mandatory things All civilian government is about 3% of GDP
It's not enough That's why we solve no social problems in the United States But
if you add in the parts that they don't want to cut or can't touch plus this
meager 3% you end up with a budget deficit of about 6 to 7% of GDP which is
what we have now This has been going on for 20 years So our debt is 100% of GDP
and rising The Congressional Budget Office yesterday issued a new report
saying by 20 55 the debt will be at 155%
of GDP on current policy So if you keep current policy and just extrapolate for
30 years we reach 155% of GDP
debt So what is Trump trying to do trump is trying to cut taxes relative to
baseline This is all technical because the baseline includes ending some of the tax cuts from 10 years ago but he wants
to extend those How to do that with such a huge budget
deficit There's no way There is no way to do this other than to completely
destroy the civilian government And that's what Elon Musk is doing day by
day He's not rooting out waste He's just closing the government as much as
possible The public will hate this week by week month by month when nothing
works when they can't get health care when there's no one to answer a call for
social security and so on And that's where we're heading in the next months
That's why I was saying you can't ask for more funding for uh Ukraine in that
context period because there's really going to be a a at least a public brawl
Trump will win this budget battle in my best estimation It will be brutal and
ugly to essentially keep the revenues completely
inadequate and brutally slashspending for poor people or even
workingclass people in America But he'll probably get this through because it'll be a straight partyline vote enforced by
Elon Musk who will threaten anyone who steps out of line He'll probably win
this battle but believe me you'll see a very ugly very unhappy country a very
unpopular government and nothing's going to get better out of it because nothing
that's being done is going to make people's lives easier Several thousand
rise of prices for automobiles is not going to make people's lives easier
higher tariffs is not going to make people's lives easier and the budget
deficit will remain significant And this is I think what we're likely to see within a few months
In other words not not not a president who is using his
vast popularity with the masses to push through radical change but rather a very
unpopular very unpopular government that is in
fundamental inconsistency of policy with what his own
voters want And then what do you do well you can deport more people You can try
to make more noise You can double down You can be become more authoritarian I
don't know what will happen but it will not be a happy course in the coming
months And that's why I believe on the we could talk about the constructive
side I'm very optimistic about this region I I I really am And I don't think the US is going to upset anything in
this region actually And I think we should be clear about that Um but I
don't believe in a grand bargain or anything else I think the US is mainly to be
uh viewed with some sadness maybe a little bit of alarm
uh but not to expect something very constructive
because the contradictions are just too large right now and we need to work out
a new political arrangement in the country and we we're not going to do that simply It's going to be many many
years in my view before all of these contradictions get sorted out
Can before we leave America and go to other parts of the world including this
one can you Jeff comment on the following
statement that Trump probably has a deep fear and worry
and recognition that America is no longer
the hgeimon no longer the number one player in the world in many areas
Although overall I think by far America is still the number one but the fear in
him is perhaps driving a lot of the decisions that he makes Uh so he's not
speaking out of uh inward strong belief of their own success rather it is a
strong belief of America's uh waning in a relative sense Uh is that
your reading of the situation sorry you're just finishing the appetizer Uh
we all will express our sympathy to you toward the end of this session
It's a very good question of what Trump himself views and
what the the political elites view uh the situation
Um thank you Marco
Rubio said one clear direct
uh correct and honest statement when he said the
unipolar world is over That's probably the single most
important statement that's been made in the American political scene in the
Trump administration It wasn't contradicted No one jumped up and said "Oh Marco you're
too pessimistic or why are you saying that?" So I think that there is a real
understanding Yes there are multiple powers and uh yes the United States is
no longer in charge I don't know what implication
uh they take from that and how much Trump's actions are in some response to
that I think there are several points that are
uh that do follow that we could trace one as I said Trump is not interested
in the Ukraine war at all So he would like it to end He's in no position to
ask for more financial support for Ukraine in any event
So that's why the war will end one way or another But he probably also understands
we're not defeating Russia Uh and so the whole point is uh pretty useless to be
having this war That's a reflection of reality uh in
this sense But he t take another implication
of that One implication is he'd like to devo he he's happy to divide the spoils
of Ukraine with Putin You take these minerals we'll take these minerals So
they're they're dividing up Ukraine Ukraine is the is is is the absolute
loser in this predicate what French and Britain used to do in the Middle East
This is basically this is basically what Trump is is doing or trying to do I
don't think it can work so crudely as uh as Trump believes But that's the level
at which is this is being done he and Vladimir will divide Ukraine
and will end the conflict and we'll respect each other on that But then
Trump is also asking how can America regain its its
strength and he comes up with multiple answers One answer that he's
absolutely dead serious about is recognizing that because of global
warming ironically the northern route and the Arctic has been opened up and
the United States is not an Arctic country other than a small stretch of
Alaska And so Trump absolutely believes that Canada needs to
belong to the United States and Greenland needs to belong to the United States That is not rhetoric It's not a
joke It is obscene but it is not a joke Uh and the reason that he wants it is
that the Arctic has become a strategic part of the world because it's no longer
an icebound wilderness It's now going to be central for international trade and
resource development And so that's where that comes from So
that's a a kind of limited imperialism It's a western hemisphere imperialism
that Trump is actually trying to invoke
Again I think the US probably will militarily occupy Greenland during his
uh administration That's an invasion of Europe I bet that it will take place I
don't think the US will occupy Canada but I do think that with the 50,000
people of Greenland the United States may just decide it's going to take
Greenland and that's that It won't stand It won't work for the longer term It
will be a disaster but it could very well happen So that's the kind one kind
of response Trump also I'm sure believes that the tariffs
are necessary for America to restore its greatness in some sense And probably
what he has in mind is we don't produce enough steel and aluminum to build our
uh arms industry and so forth and we can't compete with China uh unless we
restore basic heavy industry So I think that that is uh he doesn't express it in
a very clear way and the tariff policy is an absurd way to approach this and
it's going to fail but it's probably on his mind in the way you're saying Ronnie
that um that this is part of the rebuilding process for the US
The problem that I have with all of that is I've never seen more illiterate
economic policy be it's not even policy That's a
grandiose term for what passes as a thought process day by day We have no
institutional We have no institution in the United States asking the question
about industrial policy or strategy None We have no planning agency We have no
NRDC NDRC um we have uh no uh economy
ministry We have no
institutional process thinking about America's economic future
because this is not how it's done in the United States The only industrial planning we have in the United States is
the Pentagon Uh and that's to build you know F-35s and so on It's not to do
infrastructure or economic revitalization So what Trump is doing is
complete improvisation You cannot run a $30 trillion economy on
improvisation But that's literally what is happening right now uh in terms of
government policy We don't even have congressional hearings where ideas are discussed where experts testify We don't
have white papers We don't have green papers We don't have any process of
thinking right now We have edicts from the White House That's a very strange
way to run a country You know uh let me change uh the direction a little bit Um I'm with you
and John Misha by the way um that why should America protest in 1962
uh the Russian uh moving the uh weapons into Cuba why is that unacceptable and
yet now uh they are against uh Russia uh after Russia warned the West repeatedly
not to move NATO one inch to the east as Bill Clinton promised So so so so so I have no
problem with that But what I do have a problem with is I am really impressed how
that Donald Trump is able to before the war of Ukraine
ended to become friends with Putin again and shake hands Uh I'm not so interested
in the psych personal psychology of it or nor the social uh uh political aspect
of it But what I am concerned
is what will that do to the rest of the world
what will that do to Russia uh it it's truly amazing And you know
you other people other people dare not think certain things let alone say it Uh
and if you were to say it people would say you are the craziest guy and stupid and yet Donald Trump says says it uh as
if as a matter of factly and nobody object Yeah And being the president he
has the wherewithal to do a lot of things about it And this is a brave new
world that we are seeing Um you know by the way personally I
agree with a lot of things that uh Trump some of the things that Trump is
doing but what is the cost of it the in international institutions are being
totally ignored if not damaged wiped out the rules the rule-based society which
America love to say the rule-based society has no more rules because America is breaking it and nobody dare
to say a word about it And so is it worth it to do what he says he what he's
doing which may not may have a legitimacy to it in some ways Uh I'm
making my my question longer so that he can finish his speech Yeah So please
comment on what I have said Many points Thank you You can finish it I don't take Thank you Um don't let them take it away
though It's very good I
I think that there are uh a few points to say about the the
so-called rule-based order that are probably worth uh worth saying I did a study last year with a
colleague on comparing how countries do or do not
abide by the UN principles and whether they vote with or
against the majorities in the General Assembly whether they join UN treaties
or don't join UN treaties and so forth And we call this an index of alignment
with the UN charter The United States ranked last in the world over the last 20 years Last
Correct It was uh the US has not ratified a major UN treaty for decades
In fact the mere fact that it is a UN treaty leads the Senate to reject it
because there's a view that well if the rest of the world wants it it must be against us Uh it's a kind of paranoia
which is predates Trump but is very pervasive We once had legislation to
prevent uh discrimination against people with disabilities The US adopted this It was
one of the first or the first in the world and then it went to the UN and it
became a UN treaty When it became a UN treaty the Senate refused to ratify it
because it was a UN treaty And so this is a absolutely
pervasive weird phenomenon The United States votes least of all countries with
the majority in the UN General Assembly Part of that is that it votes
with Israel against the whole world uh on issues of Palestinian rights But it's
more than that The US became the great champion against the developing country
call for any kind of social justice Every year the UN votes a massive
majority against the use of unilateral sanctions You know under international
law no one country is allowed to put on economic sanctions against other
countries Sanctions are reserved as a right for the UN not for
an individual country But which country uses sanctions every day is the United
States by presidential decree not even by congressional action So in
this sense the US has in my opinion not been a leader of a rules-based order The
US has been a leader of a USbased order Okay it you could say it had some
advantages it had some disadvantages but the phrase rules-based order was never
defined Whose rules not the rules of the UN certainly not by
any objective measure This is not something new This is what I was saying
has been true for 30 years Trump Trump says publicly what is
hypocritical privately So Trump is stunning in
uh saying I don't care about rules I don't care about treaties I don't
believe in any of this but the US behavior has been quietly to neglect all
of this while professing to lead a rules-based order So Trump is just uh
making explicit what has been implicit for a long time He's much worse in my
view because who walks out of the World Health Organization or who walks out of
uh the uh Paris climate agreement it takes a lot of nerve in my view to do
that It's repudiating the world interest in the most explicit way So our earlier
governments didn't do that but they also did not do anything positive to uh
assist when it came to the Paris agreement for example The United States
has expanded tremendously its supply of fossil fuels
since 2015 We have never had legislation
in the United States on climate change Never We had some tax cuts for renewable
energy in the so-called inflation reduction act but that was quite different from climate action Congress
will not vote climate action because of the corruption that I talked about before because big oil is more powerful
than renewable energy in the American political scene So all of this is to say
that I abhore the way that
Trump behaves but it's not so different in many ways from longstanding behavior
When it comes to Ukraine that's a whole another matter which we won't discuss at
length except I'll just repeat I believe that the US was the provocation Ronnie
said and explained Russia didn't want uh
NATO on its border any more than the United States wanted the Soviet Union in
in Cuba in 1962 And and Condi Rice has been saying
it all along that NATO must expand to the east Exactly And this was a very
direct provocation Look at how by the way if we want to talk about
hypocrisy the the United States has military bases of course all over this
region and yet Hutchinson can't have a port in Panama
Okay that's the double standard that is gets us into a ridiculous amount of
trouble because under the US mindset the Western Hemisphere is ours up to and
including Greenland and Canada by the way But all the rest of the world has
been America's playground to do as it sees fit the Middle East
anywhere NATO enlargement anywhere until uh Trump at least uh saying no on that
but in East Asia still of course anywhere my own view by the way I don't
know whether it would be subscribed to here or not but my own view quite
strongly is the United States should stop unilaterally any armaments
to Taiwan Period And I say to do that for the safety of Taiwan There's nothing
more dangerous for Taiwan than sending Taiwan armaments in my view This is the
same as happened with Ukraine If you wanted to be friends with Ukraine keep
NATO away And there's a famous adage which people know
which I and others repeat almost daily Henry Kissinger's adage that to be an
enemy of the United States is dangerous but to be a friend is fatal And Taiwan
should be very careful They're not careful But this is the kind of thing where the double standard Imagine if
China were arming the upper west side of New York because we're against Trump Uh
it would not go down well Uh and uh I think we should be very
uh cognizant of this risk Well qu
there's a few of you who have never been to this meeting So they are asking a question which is unbelievable in this
setting and that is will there be a time of Q&A There's always a lot of time for
Q&A Good So uh Jeff is not going to go home Sorry Sonia for quite a while Uh we
know that Thank you Sonia Um uh by the way 20 years ago uh so they can finish a
dessert 20 years ago I was invited by Mitch McConnell and his wife Ela Child to uh Kentucky to their hometown and
they the two of them drove me around personally um and showing me this building that
building and I had zero interest because uh Hong Kong has far more bigger
buildings than in Kentucky Uh my only interest that day was to try
to convince Mitch McConnell to start paying United Nation
dues for America And America has a habit of not paying That's it And uh that is
truly amazing But let me ask you another question and that is you were you remind
me by the way of uh about comparing the size of buildings to uh an American was
visiting Israel actually a kabutz and he the farmer shows him around the kabuts
this Texan and at the end he says you know that's fine but where I come from I
can get in my car in the morning I can drive the entire day and I'm still on my
farm at night And the Israeli looks at him and says "You know I once had a car
like that too." Now Jeff I want you to I want you to
extend what happened Donald Trump's view about Russia
Thank you Fresh food right Sure And that is if Russia which America has been
against ever since the the Ukraine war started America can make good
uh with Russia at least Donald Trump Yes And nobody else is objecting it Okay Yes
Publicly Now could it be that well America really know that in order to
revive its hedgeimonyy it got to get its economy right and picking a fight with
Russia or with China uh is not necessarily good for Americans economic
health And so it's avoiding fighting Russia Could it be that Donald Trump
would be so enlightened that hey let's not pick on China either It's not good for ourselves
and and and and so concentrate on rebuilding the economy y while keeping
peace with China Uh after all he has slapped uh uh you know tariffs on Mexico
Canada and uh China is sort of you know they are 20% extra but anyway it's on
the side right now It's not yet the focus Uh could it be that they will never get to that focus and have a
direct confrontation with China is that possible it is possible Uh it it is uh
actually the the big question the the relations with China
will not be warm Let's be sure about that Uh the American mindset across the
political class and now in the society as well because of this is China's a
threat It's an enemy Uh it's a danger I don't think that is going to go
away It could I think it's completely facious in my view But uh I don't see
that as going away in the same way as with Russia But I think the question is
why not i think the question I'll so let me say why not
Um there is there was up until very recently and may and there still is in
some parts a view in Washington a real view maybe like in Ukraine that we are
heading towards war with China To my mind it's a mind-boggling
view First if it were to happen the United
States would be defeated Period Period Because it's a big ocean and you
cannot and if there's a war in uh the South China Sea or in in the China
neighborhood believe me the United States cannot win that war in every war
game done in the United States and every war game has confirmed that point
It's and it's even more true in with the advances of technology of the last few
years where everything is surveyed including ships uh and every ship is
vulnerable to hypersonic missiles and projecting power across an ocean depends
on a navy and it can't be done the same way as it could have been done 20 or 30 or 40 years ago given technological
change So in my view the whole idea is horrendous not to mention the fact that
it could easily lead to the destruction of the world But uh there are still
definitely parts of the American scene that want to project that there is quite
possibly a war coming with China Maybe it's to build missile systems Maybe it's
to justify the Pentagon budget Maybe it's the belief that yes that could
really happen But that is not a small view in Washington It got into our
official documents in shocking ways I was shocked when last year's naval uh
strategy document of our the the head of the Navy uh said we must prepare for war
with China We must be ready for war with China by 2027 This was in print in the opening
lines of this naval strategy just to even talk like this is so reckless and
provocative in my view But that found its way into many many uh
areas So given all of that and the fact and one more thing to
say about Ukraine uh in in this regard Why did Trump come to the
view to not pursue the Ukraine war well fundamentally because the US was losing
this proxy war Uh in other words the US tried It wanted to see whether Putin
would back down or not It wanted to see whether the sanctions would be enough to
destabilize the Russian economy It wanted to see whether Putin would resist
uh mobilizing the domestic population It wanted to see whether the himemer and
attack of missile systems would prevail and so forth All of that failed Uh
Ukraine got uh very badly mauled It's losing on the battlefield It's expensive
It's a losing hand There's no practical way to change that And so Trump is
throwing in the hand on that basis

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Part 2 of 2

When it comes to China that kind of view has
not yet happened Uh you know we've had three years of failure in Ukraine in
fact many more years than that but at least three years of direct failure whereas when it comes to China the view
is the big battle is still ahead and one
of the reasons for some of the Trump people to say get out of Ukraine is not
for rebuilding America it's for the bigger battle ahead actually John
Mirshimer takes that position in not that He wants war but he says Ukraine's
a sideshow The real issue for US security is China So we shouldn't
squander our limited resources on a sideshow We should be building for not
war but for the contest with China So
psychologically the mood is really very different regarding China Now having
said all of that I think Trump does not want conflict with China He He's actually not
a wararmonger Correct He's not a war It's strange Yeah He's nasty by the way Right He's
attacking American institutions He's in favor of locking up our students Uh he's
in favor of breaking the law He's in favor of uh abuse uh he's in favor of uh
deporting people He's a nasty person He's a bully
but he's not a wararmonger against a a an equal
adversary He doesn't like war And so in this sense it's possible to distinguish
between an unpleasant economic relationship and threat hostility blame
and still say and my good friend President Xi and not view it in any
personal level and not view it as wararmongering So I think that's the optimistic view I don't think it gets
better than that in that they will be best buddies and
and have you know some kind of economic grand bargain I may be pleasantly
surprised I don't think it will go that way I don't think it will even
go as far as what's happening with Putin But I do think that
avoiding conflict is absolutely possible It seems to me Jeff that the only way to
keep USChina uh from having direct conflict is for the relative strength of
the two sides to be somewhat more balanced Historically America is way
ahead But it seems that all the a a number of things that the Chinese have
done in the last two years or three years are really to tell America that we
uh something that uh I heard that um Ciinping said to Biden in uh uh in
Indonesia in Bali and that is I don't want to muck around with you but don't force me So you look at all the the
somebody said that China has hypersonic missiles They probably do um the
balloons uh the sub the US nuclear sub that was forced to surface uh in the
South China Sea uh and on and on A lot of these things seems to me to be
unprovoked on the part of the Chinese to tell America that hey you are stronger
but we have you have your Achilles heel and you don't know what I have and so
let's show you a little bit what we have less that way you won't underestimate us
in which case you will become a war you may uh start something adventuresome so
I think China is a lot of sense is telling America that but let me turn to Europe um
um or let me let me put it a different way I I was with four ministerial or
subministerial level uh friends from the Middle East in the last 60 uh 18 months
uh from four countries Egypt Saudi Arabia UAE and Israel All four of them told me that America is no longer the
dominant player in this part of the world They are on the way out And then I had Barroso uh the uh European
Commission former president together with the former uh foreign minister of uh of Spain and then the former director
general of the foreign ministry of France all at my office for dinner few
month two three months ago and I said as far as I'm concerned America is also on the way out of Europe I want to see what
is their reaction and their reaction was surprising to me
Zero Nobody had a reaction That means they take it for granted Yeah Yeah And I bump into your friend I think you must
know him A friend of mine of 20 some years uh uh 20 years uh Gutenberg Katy
Gutenberg who be became the defense secretary under Angela Merkel And it was
just a couple of weeks ago we were found ourselves in Abu Dhabi and I said what is Germany's position in this regard
they said oh as far as Germany is concerned America is already long on the way out And I talked to some local
German people uh average people and they all know that the United States is no
longer the dominant player So it seems to me that America is really moving toward
isolationism At the same time you have the Greenland thing By the way the green line thing it seems to me to from what
you have said it's a repeat of Monroe doctrines Mhm Anyway so so America is
retreating Uh do you do you see that America may be returning to its roots of
isolationism perhaps because of mistakes overseas plus maybe more important
domestic problems what is your take on that
the US uh actually was never really
isolationist Um so it's important to understand uh a little bit of the US
history Remember the US started as a sliver of the eastern seabboard of
the United States of the North American continent
So the mission of the United States from the beginning was expansion The US has
always been an expansionary force It was never isolationist But for the first hundred
years the expansion was across the continent of North America That was
imperialism because there were many indigenous nations all across and there
was this the Spanish of course and so the United States built an empire across
North America wasn't called an empire but it was effective and basically by
the way unlike other empires they didn't incorporate the nations they destroyed
them So the US was more genocidal than uh anyone else The demographics were uh
much more in favor of the United States rather than the native populations which
were beset by many demographic woes and the US exterminated virtually uh uh many
of these populations Okay As soon as the US reached the Pacific Ocean it started
its overseas imperialism So there wasn't a break Uh there was expansion from the
beginning And as soon as we usually put the date 1890 as the end of uh reaching
the Pacific then came toppling Hawaii uh and uh beginning the empire in Hawaii Uh
then in 1898 and completely uh hokey
circumstances weapons of mass destruction uh in uh in Havana Bay uh we
went to war with Spain because they said Cuba is just ripe for dropping into the
American Empire Uh and we took Cuba and Puerto Rico uh and the Philippines Uh so
that was the beginning of the American Empire overseas So I don't think that
the US was ever isolationist In the 1920s by the way uh the Senate rejected
America's membership in the League of Nations And sometimes historians say that was American isolationism But that
was actually the opposite of isolationism The opposition of Henry Kat
Lodge who led the Senate revolt against the League of Nations was that it would
limit American discretion We are an empire and we will not be beholden to an
international institution So Henry Kat lodge was an imperialist who opposed the
League of Nations because it called for international uh co-responsibility and
he didn't want that He wanted American right of maneuver After World War II
uh Roosevelt had a much more collective security vision but we became the
security state And as as I explained our foreign policy was definitely
interventionist but usually in regime change operations and many wars of choice So the US is not isolationist but
it never uh it didn't take on uh
European powers until uh the 20th century when it was it had become the
biggest economy and until several weeks ago it didn't
acknowledge any limits to its power Now the question that we're asking is given
that Trump has acknowledged the limits of American power visav Russia will he
do the same visa v China i think the answer is probably yes Then what will America do it still
has its uh expansionary fervor It will try to beat up its neighbors in the
Western Hemisphere So it's uh it's a more limited version of imperialism uh
which is Canada Panama Greenland uh too good to ignore too easy to take Uh of
course not really so easy as Trump thinks The world is not quite as
lawless God help us if it becomes that way but it's not as lawless as Trump
imagines in his mind This is not a a a real estate play uh in new in Midtown
New York Uh this is the the real thing and Canada's not going down quietly And
my student Mark Carney who's now prime minister of Canada said today
"No Canada remains Canada Don't even think about it." uh and uh I believe him
uh and I think uh he's going to probably remain prime minister also uh in view of
uh the upcoming psychological warfare uh that that's going to come
So can America learn to play by the rules that's a good question Uh you know
this rule-based order only like the rules that America made Uh and now the
question is can America play by rules that others make or that are made in a
shared way this is what we really need We need a functional United Nations Uh
we don't have it yet Trump doesn't like the idea There's even the fancy term now
that there are sovereigntists Uh that the highest aspiration for a nation
should be the right to do what it wants to do which is a kind of three-year-old
vision of the world Uh not the vision that we should all play by a common set
of rules So I think the United States is going to take some time to learn those
basic ideas as in many things and I think all of you know it America's much
better than Washington Uh if you go to middle America these are not the views
of middle America Uh middle America supports the UN 70%
uh in in most surveys Middle America does not want wars Middle America you
know wants kind of normal life Uh and so our political system got broken We need
to solve the political crisis so that our politics reflects the kind of
mainstream uh rather rather more Pacific not war
mongering of American society All the wars America's been in have either been
unpopular or covert This is quite interesting Uh Americans
didn't say bomb the Houthis They don't know who the Houthis are They don't know
where Yemen is They don't have a clue Uh and Heg has said as much in uh in in the
signal He said "Nobody knows who the Wis are We need a story." He said "That's
that's America We need PR operation We need a story Uh it's about Iran
It's about freedom of navigation No one knows who the Houthis are I have a principle by the way which is or a
principle that I want to establish which is that the United States should not bomb any country where uh if uh at least
50% of Americans cannot name two cities in that country that would basically end
all American wars because Americans don't know any geography at all So that
is my solution for peace Okay we have uh 20 to 25 minutes open to the all of you
Anyone of you want to ask a question uh please uh raise your hand and tell us who you are Okay so that we can get to
know each other better Yes you start I uh Joseph Law um uh thank you so
much Jeffrey uh for your uh sharing My question you we've talked a lot tonight about international relations but given
you're an economics professor and you've uh went into great description of how
poor the um US um fiscal situation is what's your view of where the US dollars
heading um uh in in in light of the fact that
there's probably no better alternative currency or or very very
very low low likelihood of
that in terms of investment Do the opposite of whatever I'm about to say because I get it all wrong all the time
in the short term though I'm not bad at the longer term Okay So I'm going to
give you a 10-year answer not a a a 10day answer The 10-year answer is the
dollar will play a far smaller role in the world in 10 years Not even not a
marginal decline a big decline We're going to have a multicurrency world The
renmanb is going to play a much larger role in the world Local currencies are
going to play a much larger role in the world and the role of the US dollar is
going to be tremendously diminished Why because first
technologically the swift system and the dollarbased system as a just sheer
mechanics is nothing to write home about anymore we will move to digital central
bank currencies because that's how settlements will be made far more easily
than than a swift uh system Um so
technically settlements can be done uh much more efficiently and and digitally
and that will already level the playing field Second I think that the share of
the US in the world economy will continue to decline I believe we didn't
talk about it but I believe that this region will be a region of rapid economic growth for years to come I
think ACSEAN will uh have five or six% growth consistently
China will have 5% growth consistently Hong Kong will do very well
in in this mix as playing many critical roles in a very successful region and
the US will grow 1 to 2% per year and the share of the US in everything will
diminish and also this tariff policy will not succeed The US is way behind
China on all green technologies It will
be behind China on all digital technologies Not that there won't be
some breakthroughs uh from the US I'm sure there will be some great
breakthroughs in uh in AI or other technologies But China will mass-roduce
them uh demonstrate them put them into operation on a much larger scale than
the United States and will become the lowcost producer of all of them So I
think that the uh the economics point to a diminishing role of uh the US economy
in the world economy over time which is to the good because we are right now
4.1% of the world population and on a purchasing power basis 14.8% of world
GDP So uh what I envision in a world of peace
is that the developing countries grow faster than the rich countries and that
they catch up step by step over a 30 40 50 year period and that that means that
the share of everybody goes to their population share gradually and the US
share may diminish to 10% of GDP uh in 30 or 40 years not the 14
14.8% share that it is today I believe Africa which is almost a no-show in
discussions will actually achieve significant economic growth in the next
40 years because there technology will enable that kind of rapid growth In that
context and with large budget deficits likely to continue fiscal
instability higher interest rates in the US than in China on a long-term basis
China's interest rates will remain much lower as a high-saving region the US
will become more of a credit risk and and a savings scarce uh
country Fiscal policy will not support a strong dollar and monetary and uh and
confidence in the dollar will diminish And then finally I don't know when but
the United States is going to uh so abuse the sanctions that the
bricks really are going to make uh systematic methods for non-dollar
payments soon within the next couple of years It's an interesting question By
the way the US pressure is uh slowing things because
India and Brazil are not as gung-ho uh as China and Russia and Iran and others
on making the non-dollar payments But it will come because who wants to rely on
the US dollar when the US government really freezes your money or takes your
money And if Europe does something so stupid as to actually try to seize the
euro clear frozen deposits of Russia that will also not only destroy the euro
role but it will destroy the dollar role as well because the US is complicit in that And so all of this is to say in my
view we're moving to a multicurrency world but mainly where the renmanb plays
a much larger role Uh I think that that's inevitable that that China makes the currency much more of an
international currency I think Hong Kong is going to be dealing in uh in renmanb
denominated bonds and renmanb denominated finance much much more in
the coming 10 years And why not it it's going to be a very effective alternative
You know I think no one today I go around the world a lot No one today
trusts America The you talk to the leaders in Europe not one of them trusts America
You talk to go to the Middle East not one of the leaders that I have met I've met a number of them trust America The
only one who trusts America was a military intelligence chief of former of
Israel And I said "You're the only one in the world that trusts America." And his answer is "I have no choice."
That means he knows that he doesn't trust America Yeah I mean that's a sad
thing I mean speaking of as American it it really hurts me uh to see that happen
I think the world is going to be a really messy place when that is the case Not just the RM the US dollar uh
diminishing its in its relative v uh significance but also uh without someone
that the world can trust is really not a comfortable position and only the dummies who don't know anything about
China say that China would be happy to take over that place You mean whoever says that uh is so ignorant of China
that I can believe it uh uh a and so you know uh the world we are facing is very
very troubled Ununice and then Charlie Ununice you first uh Jeffrey
quick question you've talked about a lot of examples of political dysfunction in the US and it's really shocking that
there seems to be no checks and balances on many levels and it almost seems like there's a design failure in the
governance framework of the political system How could this be changed if a
group of people were to get together to say "We're going to start a movement an initiative." How could their actions be
done to even have a slim chance of making an impact
if you ask uh the American uh uh public about um do you trust the politicians
the answer is overwhelmingly no Uh if you ask the Americans are the
politicians out for themselves or are they out for you you can guess what the
answer is by very and these are questions that Gallup for example asks frequently Um if you ask about the
ratings of different institutions Congress rates about 10%
approval rating uh Congress's uh public
approval is negligible in the United States because it's viewed as a
corrupted institution that is just dysfunctional and for the accurate
reason that it is moneyinfested Uh it is a lobbyinfested It's not representing the
constituencies So the public gets what's wrong uh quite uh I I think quite
accurately maybe you know 60 70% majority right on in my judgment
about what right is in terms of accuracy on most issues If you ask the public
should campaign finance be restricted uh
to avoid corruption 80% or so say yes
Interestingly when the Supreme Court made the Citizens United ruling there's
actually a paragraph in the majority opinion that says "Our decision will not
lead to corruption." Okay this was completely either phony or
naive but it's been proved massively wrong It says actually in the opinion
not just about corruption it won't lead to a loss of confidence of the public in
the political system So what should be done to
fix the American system you know it's not bad on paper In fact
it's it's somewhat ingenious It's a little outdated It was made in 1787 You
wouldn't you wouldn't do it exactly the same way now but it could work And the
two main changes that I would recommend to get it started in the right direction
would be radical reform of campaign financing and other changes to allow
third parties and and other uh kinds of political representation to take hold
and second eliminating much of the apparatus of the security state which I
regard as enimical to democratic practice and to sane foreign policy So I
think there is a practical agenda of what to do
Now if the Supreme Court in its wisdom would continue to say "No you can't
change the campaign laws uh that is a deadly trap for America."
Then you'd either have to have a new Supreme Court that would be more sensible which would overturn its own
decision which they do usually 30 or 50 or 75 years after a bad decision Or you
would have a constitutional amendment which by the way would be wildly supported across the United States but
would be very hard to muster against the vested interests that are benefiting from the current system So there would
be massive legal challenges and obstacles and so forth So again I
believe we're structurally uh in in a in a corner for identifiable
reasons that the American public also senses and that is the way a reform
party could possibly take hold But I can tell
you reform is very difficult partly because the two corrupted
parties have their own hold on getting on ballots running candidates being
heard in the media The system is designed right now uh in a way that is
very hard to overcome Impossible not at all
uh we're past the point where you have to raise the consciousness of the public
We're into the mechanics of power uh that is at stake right now So the public
knows what's wrong and maybe that's an optimistic sign that some political
entrepreneur will be able to come along and like Trump's entrepreneurship He's a
very clever political entrepreneur He sensed a way to uh to to win power uh on
what I regard as a a profoundly flawed basis but somebody could perhaps
come along and win power on the right basis and actually lead an era of reform
It's possible Johnny and then Al Reyes and then Brian
Thank you Ronnie Uh thank you Jeffrey That uh you know it's getting late so I'm uh I I'm going to make it quick
First of all you probably have not seen these 30 minutes interview uh uh by uh
Brett Bayer of Fox News uh with Elon Musk and his senior Dodge team uh today
No I did not Yeah it's actually very very good you they describe the type of
abuse and the waste uh they have discovered and you know at least somebody's doing this and someone close
to Musk told me personally his bodyguard is actually bigger than the United
States of pres the president of United States so he's clearly putting his personal life
on the line for this um second thing is uh you use the word provo um provocation
with respect to Russians and the Ukraine conflict and
you use the word mayhem to describe the Israeli situation Clearly to me both if if if
Russian was provoked it Israel was provoked it as well and uh if Israel is
doing the manhand job Russia clearly is doing that as well So how do you square
these two with each other sure So uh just as a again as as a simple
arithmetic matter no matter what Elon Musk
cuts it doesn't address the core of the fiscal situation in the United States I
know the numbers There is no way in the world that he solves the fiscal problem
The fiscal problem requires higher tax revenues That's all There's no way in
the United States that we are going to have a fiscal policy of a budget that is
responsible that meets basic needs of the American people uh that honors
social security and health care other than through higher taxes And the fact
that we can't discuss that is because of the broken political system
So that's just fiscal arithmetic and we could go through the numbers I don't
care what they find It doesn't add up to what is really at stake here which is 7%
of GDP budget deficit Not even close Okay When it comes to
Israel the reason for Israel facing the attacks that it does
is that from 1967 onward and one can even
discuss the 1967 war but let me put that aside for the moment Israel has taken
the view that it will keep all the land that it conquered in
1967 That's the basic policy of Israel since
1967 One political party which has dominated Israel since
1978 is the Lud party which is Netanyahu's party It is the core of lood
the very core of the movement that there will never be a Palestinian state Now
given that there are 16 million people in the territory of pre uh of so-called
mandatory Palestine before Israel it was created in 1948
Half of those are Palestinian Arabs and half of those are
Jews That's the situation right now The 8 million Jews rule over the 8 million
Palestinians Netanyahu's entire strategy spelled out
since 1996 has been that we will hold on to
all of Palestine and if anyone tries to stop us from doing so our big buddy
behind us will clobber them That's Israel's policy So Israel's policy and
it's very explicit I could go through a a very detailed account of it Israel's
policy is we know that this will be unpopular and we will have to overthrow
any government that supports the Palestinian cause And in
2001 the so-called neocons who are also the so-called Zionist part of the US
government produced a document which is also well known and I've talked to two
people who know it very well General Wesley Clark and
another Air Force commander Dennis Fritz that called for seven wars in the
Middle East in five years after 2001 And those seven wars were to take
out Israel's enemies And those seven wars were
Lebanon Syria Iraq Somalia Libya Sudan and
Iran And there have been six of those wars fought on Israel's behalf
and they have led to an ongoing bloodbath in the Middle East In
Africa Libya is in civil war Sudan now has two civil wars because the US
divided the country and then each one has a civil war Somalia doesn't exist as
a state Lebanon is under attack of Israel today Syria today literally is
under attack of Israel after being taken over by al-Qaeda backed by the United
States by the way And uh the United States is pushing for Israel is pushing
for war with Iran I have no sympathy for Israel's
policies at all I find them abhorrent I have to say as an American Jew I find
them disgusting because they have prevented peace with the Palestinian
people And the answer for peace is a state of Palestine and a state of Israel
And when one asks is that possible i speak regularly with the
foreign ministers across the Middle East I'm talking about Egyptian foreign
minister Jordanian foreign minister Turkish foreign minister Saudi foreign minister I know all of them personally
and I talked to them at length The Arab world has been asking for peace with
Israel since 2002 in what's called the Arab Peace Initiative and Israel has
been giving them the finger and saying no because we will keep all of the
territory Now this is suicidal in my point of view for Israel and it is
illegal and utterly cruel So an attack comes on October 7th Did that come out
of the blue no The attack on October 7th came after more than 50 years of brutal
occupation by Israel and complete rejection of a state of Palestine So I
have no sympathy for Netanyahu I regard him as one of the most violent deranged
political leaders in modern history Actually I want them to stop because I
know I speak to the Iranians I speak to across the organization of Islamic
cooperation 57 countries I probably know half of the foreign ministers of the OIC
Everybody wants peace except Israel Israel wants control It does Does
Netanyahu offer a single alternative other than we defeat Hamas has he
uttered one sentence about a political outcome no Not a you know why because
his whole career his whole life is based on preventing a state of Palestine
What's the answer you know what their answer is kick them out That's their
answer That is literally the policy That's what Trump was talking about a
few weeks ago And then people told him "No no no Mr President don't say that."
uh and uh and the Egyptians and the Jordanians said "We're not taking them
We're not going to have ethnic cleansing in our neighborhood again." So all of
this is to say I've been going to Israel since
uh 53 years
53 years ago were the first illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank It
was explained to me when I was a high school senior We're putting facts on the
ground Jeffrey Okay we're 53 years later and the Middle East
is in a blood bath still So that's why I have no sympathy at all My first trip
there was 50 years ago So you beat me by three years Al Reyes our scholar in residence at a Hong Kong and also with
the University of Hong Kong Thank you very much Um I'm wondering if you could uh comment on two things One uh what is
the impact of the US withdrawal from the Paris agreement where does that leave
the international effort on climate change and the other thing um the situation at Colombia University of
interest Thank you Your university Go ahead All right Let me take Colombia and then the last one because the last one
is all about you actually about Hong Kong's role Uh American foreign policy is guided by
the Israel lobby pure and simple The attack on Colombia University is an
attack by the Israel lobby on American universities It's not it's not close to
being subtle It is you cannot state support for
Palestine What I just said if a student says that with a foreign visa they get
deported They cannot say what I just said and literally they will get dragged
out of their dorm We wonder whether I will I don't think so But uh but the
truth is if a student says this they will get expelled
Now that's because we're in the hands of a lobby That's how American politics
works American politics works by control by very specific vested interests Now
let me turn to the last uh question the second part
or the world needs uh an
accelerated energy transformation and there's a lot more
than energy in this uh by energy transformation I mean going to electric
vehicles I mean going to zerocarbon energy sources I mean going to the
hydrogen economy All of that plus we need a similar land use transformation
for deforestation and for other related areas Analytically it's quite clear what
to do uh even what technologies and how to uh the timing and so on when it comes
to climate change Without going into uh
detail the situation is dramatic on climate change It's worse than the
IPCC and other official bodies have said and my colleagues at Colombia have been
telling me this I happen to have who the as colleagueuh James Hansen who I regard
as the world's greatest climatologist and I've been leading hundreds of
climatologists when I directed the Earth Institute at Columbia University So I know this community He's the best He's
been telling me for 20 years that the situation is much worse than the
consensus statements in the last three years Just to make one point the
temperature rose.3° C in three years
Why basically according to Hansen's uh very important work pollution has
been partly controlled especially on ocean shipping the sulfate aerosols And
as that has gone down that used to dim the sunshine as that has gone down the
underlying warming has come to the surface So he's been saying for years
we're warming more than the temperature shows because the temperature is being masked by pollutants And now that the
pollutants are being cleaned up now the underlying temperature increase is becoming more evident The energy
imbalance is becoming more evident So we're really already at 1.5 degrees C
warming the limit that we said We already reached it That was supposed to be the top limit In 10 years from now
we'll be at 1.8 degrees or even higher We're on a trajectory that is really
extraordinarily rapid Now what does that mean it means we we need to stop
producing fossil fuels Means we need to uh and the coalbased economy in China
means we need to have a massive buildout of of zerocarbon power It means
everybody needs to drive BYDs Okay th this this is the basic this is the basic
idea We need a plan for that Let me give you one piece of the
plan Chinese solar companies have the capacity of 1.2 2 uh one
1.2 billion gigawatts of solar produ module production per
year Right now China's exporting or deploying half of that
capacity The US calls that over capacity That's crazy We need all of
that capacity to be deployed urgently on the planet So China should be selling
twice as much as it's producing right now Twice as much That requires
throughout ASEAN throughout Africa throughout other countries an
accelerated energy transformation Why doesn't that happen
partly there's lack of plan Partly there's lack of finance that's adequate
where you come in in my view is to finance this energy
transformation at a expanded accelerated scale
I believe the greater Bay Area by the way is at the center of the global
solution space because between Hong Kong and Shenzhen Shenzhen you have all the
technologies throughout the GBA you have all the production facilities
Hong Kong you have all of the finance capacity the ability to to to harness
all of that capacity at a vastly expanded scale And I think this should
be incorporated into the next into the 15th plan that Hong Kong's role is this
massive scale up of deployment of China's green capacity as part of Belt
and Road as part of ASEAN scale up as part of other initiatives of
uh China GBA Hong Kong So where does the US fit in this it just
handed you the leadership and the responsibility The United States said
"Wow we're not going to do this." Okay we're not going to do this And the
United States is not going to be a player in this for four years at least
And then when it wakes up it's going to be 10 years behind China in
competitiveness if not more You think anyone is going to sell an electric vehicle other than China i don't think
so In in a third market other than a pro highly protected US market because
China's way ahead China's way ahead on solar China's way ahead on wind China's
way ahead on hydrogen China's way ahead on green shipping everything China's got
So please you guys implement this at at
rapid scale This is the vocation for Hong Kong to save the world now Wow
Honestly I I mean it I mean it for real I don't mean it
just rhetorically And all of this can be put into place
because nothing's magical about it The capacity is there The finance is there
The low interest rates is there The belt and road initiative is there And the United States did a great favor to you
Trump is doing the best favor to global climate Why because up until now I can
tell you I know this hour by hour day by day the United States has slowed down
everything in this global consensus So everything's negotiated and everything
is basically halted by the US There's no real money There's no real plan There's
no real action but there are agreements Now the United States has said "We're
done we're out of here So China should say "Okay we move and uh prove that it's
not over capacity it's just wonderful capacity."
Before I tell you Jeff how you misspoke uh I want to and the last two
question uh I want to recognize uh the a global trustee of the Asia society have
just walked in and that is Nicholas Agusen and his wife Inis Great to have you and uh Nicholas has a lot to say So
I suggest Jeff that before you go home that you talk to Jeff uh you talk to
Nicholas briefly Uh the last two question goes to uh uh Brian Goo and
then Eddie Tam and Brian happened to be the president and Xpunk uh the vice
chairman of Xpunk the other uh EV company uh which a competitor of BYD So
yeah we we'll forgive you prove me wrong Right Anyway so Brian and
then Eddie and then finally I wonder if the youngest person in this room would like to ask a question If he does you
know who you are You're the youngest Uh you're welcome to ask the very last question or you can concede It's up to
you Brian Yeah Well Professor Sax uh very excited about you know your vision
for new energy which we sharehost wholeheartly Uh the other area
I think uh you know where companies is in the greater Bay Area Yeah we're the greater Bay Area EV company as well
Wonderful But another area everybody talked about is AI Um again US obviously
still has a leadership to date but my question to you is uh how does you think
about AI helping shaping the world order going forward on one end you can talk
about you know anytime you have technology especially transformative technology like AI emerging it will help
uh you know players to catch up with the existing you know powerhouses we saw you know China catching up German in in in
previous years Japan um on so there's a democratization happening with
technology especially with powerful technology AI but on the other hand uh US clearly are using AI as a tool to
really you know force you know allies and countries to fall in line you know because they feel like they possess uh
the chips the algorithm the talent the money and AI becomes their way of you
know continue the uniolar world so how do you envision the development AI
shaping the future world in the way that you see it yeah that's a a great um
great question Basically uh at at the fundamental level
AI is a profound empowerment for sustainable development It really could
play as I think we all sense a decisively positive role in ending
poverty expanding health care expanding education expanding uh public services
across the board So I think that it can work in an extremely important way for humanity
It's a remarkable set of new tools Having said that all the caveats jump to
mind One is that AI can be profoundly
misused of course in many different ways it can become the basis of
militarization rather than the basis of sustainable development And from an
economic point of view the fascinating question is what does it mean for jobs and what does it mean for income
distribution uh it's a it's it's a absolutely
fascinating and unknown uh answer I'm trying myself as a
macroeconomist for the last 15 years even before the large language models to
try to understand better what will happen because one vision is well we're
going to be in a world of abundance because the robots will do all the work for us and that's great and there's some
truth to that and the other uh vision is the dystopian vision that there will be no jobs because the robots will do
everything so a small group will own uh everything and the rest will be insurfed
or completely impoverished When you as a theoretical economist I can nicely write
a uh a mathematical model of either the utopian or the dystopian vision Uh in
other words I don't think you can rule out on logic alone whether this is a
godsend for everybody and we all have endless leisure time because the
humanoid robots that are being produced nearby here are going to do all the work
for us or whether we really have a society completely divided between Elon
and the rest of us uh and um and and uh both are probably possible In my
theoretical analysis I give a lot of role to government as uh playing a
distributive role in an AI world to ensure that the benefits of AI spread
everywhere So I don't think that market forces alone with powerful
AI benefit everybody necessarily You could have a tremendous divide in
society resulting from that So this is
um this is one part of the answer On the geopolitical
question I've always believed because of historical experience that no country
keeps a monopoly on technology Uh but it
could keep it long enough to win a decisive advantage over others The British had the steam engine long enough
by themselves that they ended up conquering the world in the 19th century Uh and it was because of the steam
engine that Hong Kong became Hong Kong of course Uh and so in this sense we
have to ask are there such choke points My general belief has been for decades
that technology moves faster than governments or economies across borders
And the most important single case of that
was 80 years ago this year The US invented the atomic bomb and believed in
the inner councils of government that the US monopoly would last for 30 years
And it lasted four years until the Soviet Union uh uh produced its own
atomic weapons This year deepseek ended uh the sense of uh of of American
chokeold on AI Uh you probably didn't need deepsek for that to happen but deep
seep was a deep seek was a a uh a wonderful proof of concept that there
are not choke points on technology I think China can work
around or replicate or find other means
uh when it comes to small nanometer semiconductors I
think China competes or surpasses the US in AI Now it's got a bigger scale of
researchers It's got a bigger scale of universities It's got a bigger uh R&D
ecosystem than the United States has right now Where China certainly surpasses the United States is in
production uh of everything maybe except the most advanced semiconductor chips
but I would give that also a short period of time before that surpassed as well But the US can't even come close to
competing on EVs Tell me if I'm wrong but I don't believe
the US could ever compete with you on cost on quality I don't think the US can
compete on humanoid uh robots We don't have the production ecosystems to do it
Shenzhen does uh or or GBA does but Silicon Valley doesn't produce anything
other than ideas and blueprints it doesn't uh it doesn't produce hardware and they can't run a factory in the
United States because they can't even find a workforce for for the factory uh that is qualified anymore So I think
that um I I don't believe that the US can
hold this and I think the genius of deep seek and more generally
of Chinese the Chinese approach right now if I may if I'm right in
understanding this is going open source uh is a great jujitsu move uh and on top
of everything else you know it builds an international ecosystem
that open AI or uh or or other US tech giants won't
build uh and because they think they can do it on a proprietary basis China
couldn't do it on a proprietary basis as a second mover perhaps but it just opened up the the source code and now
China's going to control the the global source code environment because of this
and that's a great benefit for the whole world and I think a winning move for
China That's that's my interpretation Okay Uh Eddie make it fast Yeah Uh this
is Eddie Tam Thank you very much for wonderful talk uh actually very good setup for my question So it may sound
wonderful that if uh America acknowledges it limit with respect to Russia and then hopefully also China and
then hopefully they'll you know stop supplying arms to Taiwan and they'll probably close a lot of military bases
around the world But is that really paradise because I think uh we have already starting to see evidence that
this may prompt uh nuclear proliferation back to your point So now I think Poland
Romania Germany as well as even Korea Japan and God knows if Taiwan will want
to develop uh nuclear weapons So if that were the case does that lead to a safer
or less safe world yeah that's a ter terrific big question I I I think that
uh Europe will create an autonomous uh
uh security regime and military And I think
that one way or another France's nuclear capacity will
become a Europeanwide capacity Not that Poland will get nuclear weapons on its own but
that there will be some regional approach uh based on France's nuclear
deterrence or maybe Britain will rejoin Europe and it will be a British uh
French uh nuclear uh umbrella This is my own view I I don't I think that there
are overwhelming pressures on places like
Poland which I advised and know well and let us hope that they don't uh try
anything uh in in terms of nuclear weapons when it comes to this region
My own strong view is that other than cold war
legacy and US politics there is no reason for
uh ongoing tensions between the
ROK Japan and China just for the three So I believe in 10 years we're likely to
see much closer relations in Northeast Asia uh among Korea Japan and China And
even the meeting of the foreign ministers a few days ago I think points in that direction because who can rely
on the United States anymore So Japan has to have a different approach and I
don't see any intrinsic uh conflict among those three North
Korea is a little more complicated But uh North Korea also by the way could
have been handled in a completely different way It was John Bolton and the
United States which blocked off any kind of peaceful approach towards North Korea
And so there was a way even to address the North Korean issue as late as the
1990s Clinton made some halting start in that direction John Bolton is one of our
most distinguished incompetents uh in American uh modern American history and
he completely messed up everything Um so my my vision of uh the uh the the
future organization of the world is stronger regional cooperation in general
uh maybe ARP becomes an really an operational region for here not divided
by any kind of cold war divides the African Union what's called seac in for
Latin America and the Caribbean countries uh the US Russia China India
on their own because they're all giants basically um and that
uh because of the size and the scale of these different regional entities rather
than smaller nation states we find peace across the major regions and no major
region can defeat another major region uh and so uh hopefully we will have
nuclear deterrence at with each side maintaining 20 nuclear weapons rather
than uh 1,600 nuclear weapons and go back to nuclear arms control It's not
impossible that we go in that direction Even Trump by the way has said he wants
to resume nuclear arms control It's shocking Sorry to open another line but
I I and I won't do it The US undermined the nuclear arms framework starting in
2002 by unilater unilaterally abandoning the anti-bballistic missile treaty This
was the most destabilizing action of all visav Russia actually And so Trump is
talking about going back to some kind of nuclear arms control and that's extremely positive I hate to tell you
all this but in 1999 I invited John Bolton to speak right here We accept
people from all sides We are neutral And uh the next year he came back and called
me up and said Ronnie I'm back Can I speak again i invited him back The only problem is my our deputy director at
that time told me said Ronnie is a good New York girl Uh she said "Ronnie you invite this guy back one more time I'm
out of here." So uh ever since that he has never come back Uh however I harbor
some hope that perhaps uh China which is not going to replace America as the
international police for sure Uh together with EU perhaps a little bit
reconstituted not the same uh 27 country we know it today And number three the
United States which is not going to totally retreat from the world My my my
Middle Eastern and European friends words notwithstanding the three of them will have to for self uh best interest
reasons uh and for human existence reasons come back together uh to work in
some way in order to prevent uh the situation that Eddie has mentioned Now
uh Max uh I think you are the youngest There's two that are 22 year old and I think Max you may be the younger of the
two So Max get the the the the the microphone is yours When you made the age comment uh you winked at me so I was
I figured um you're in yeah since we're talking about regions I you touched on
it briefly Professor Sax but um I was wondering particularly in the
development cycle of things where Africa lies in the equation Maybe you could elaborate a little bit on that Great
Yeah Thank Thanks Uh thanks very much Um of
course I find it very interesting and pertinent that Africa China and
India right now have the same population basically 1.4 billion people each
uh the biggest uh operating difference uh aside from poverty and the ecological
conditions and so forth is that Africa is 55 independent countries Uh India and
China are unified states albeit in a kind of federal uh arrangement or
semi-entralized arrangement in both cases to to some extent So Africa's
biggest issue in my view is unity uh creating a free trade area on the
continent organizing its infrastructure on a continental scale having
continentalwide monetary and financial policy and really uh trying to replicate
scale so that the internal market of the African continent and uh other benefits
of scale can be achieved D and this is a huge political
issue Obviously countries don't easily rel don't don't easily seed
sovereignty to a super national entity But Africa is so far behind so much in
need of development right now so vulnerable uh internally and externally
that I think the case can be made and I'm certainly trying to make it all the
time to African leaders that they better create an effective union right now And
this is a a message that I give all the time Having said that if the union can
really be created one can actually foresee
a rapid growth period for Africa which would be unprecedented basically and the
reason is poor countries have headroom for rapid growth This is the most basic
idea in economic growth which is that if your capital's scarce the returns to
investment are very significant If you don't have electricity it's great to add
electricity If you don't have roads it's great to add roads If you don't have rail you get a really big return to
adding rail If you don't have high school completion boy do you get a big
kick from going to high school completion So you can identify the investment strategy that's needed And
I've worked out in a recent study that I did with the African Development Bank a
scenario for the next 40 years modeled on China's
40-year growth from 1980 to 2020 in which Africa becomes a highincome
economy by 2063 which is their 100th anniversary of African unity
Now just one added footnote to that Africa was uh about 7% of the world
population if I remember correctly in 1950 Today it's about
18% Africa is the only region of high fertility in the world right now It's
the last place with the demographic transition it will have it but it hasn't
had it yet because it hasn't had the breakthrough to girls education through high school and other things and
urbanization and so on So the transition will come but in 20 years from now
perhaps uh and this means that on a reasonable
trajectory I mean a plausible is what I mean I don't mean good but just plausible trajectory Africa will have
two and a half billion people around midentury maybe 2055 2060 and on the
current UN media medium forecast which I don't think is accurate but it's their
medium forecast Africa reaches 3.8 billion people by 2100 and constitutes
38% of the world population by 2100 Now imagine if Africa grows rapidly
in economic terms and has this population growth Africa becomes
actually a major part of the world economy not a fringe part of the world
economy even by midentury or by60 So this is my view of what should
happen It is a major political action that is required more than anything It
is the unity to say we're going to do this uh in one coherent step because frankly 55
countries are not going to make it on their own and 14 of them are landlocked
uh and landlocked countries can't even function if they don't have ports So to
put it uh bluntly if Africa gets its political act
together and again it was Europe that created this messy map but if Europe
gets its political act together it's going to be a big part of the world in the 21st century Okay ladies and
gentlemen don't clap yet Okay don't clap yet Isn't it wonderful
fantastic Great to have with us in Hong Kong the Asia Society
Yes Now you can
clap Nevertheless let's save the most enthusiastic applause to our speaker
today We're delighted to have Jasper with us Ladies and gentlemen Jeff
[Applause] Well ladies and gentlemen there's a few
of you who are not yet members of this uh organization Uh I welcome you to uh sign
up uh with Sonali Where is Sali over there holly you are somewhere Uh Mona
right any of those Alice uh sign up Uh we have a lot of programs that are
reserved only for president circle members because they are in high demand like tonight I mean if we open it we
will have 400 people here but uh uh but but we cannot uh because I know Jeff you
know doesn't necessarily enjoy a big big big crowd which you get all the time any everywhere anyway So we thought that a
smaller event like this will be more reasonable and so we have to limit it and so we uh only uh have our corporate
members and president president circle members uh join So please if you're not a member pick up a a a membership form
on your way out The rest of us uh will all clap for

[admin]

Bessent sees de-escalation in US-China trade tensions, talks to be 'a slog'
by David Lawder and Nupur Anand
April 22, 20251:01 PM MDT Updated a day ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/bessent-s ... 025-04-22/

WASHINGTON, April 22 (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Tuesday that he believes there will be a de-escalation in U.S.-China trade tensions, but negotiations with Beijing have not yet started and would be a "slog," according to a person who heard his closed-door presentation to investors at a JP Morgan conference.

Bessent described the current bilateral trade situation as a two-way embargo, and neither side sees the status quo as sustainable, the person said. Bessent added that the Trump administration's goal was not to decouple the world's two largest economies.

Instead, Bessent said that he was hoping for a "big, beautiful rebalancing" of China's economy towards more consumption and the U.S. economy towards more manufacturing, but it was unclear whether Beijing was ready to do that, the source said.

Bessent spoke to a private investment conference in Washington held by JP Morgan Chase (JPM.N), opens new tab on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Spring Meetings. Bloomberg first reported some of his remarks from sources in the room.

Bessent said that the current situation, with 145% U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods and 125% Chinese tariffs on U.S. goods, was unsustainable, saying that a de-escalation would happen over the "very near future" that would provide "a sigh of relief" for markets, the person said.

Bessent's remarks added to positive corporate earnings momentum on Wall Street, which recovered from Monday's sell-off sparked by U.S. President Donald Trump's criticism of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Major U.S. stock indexes were up more than 2% in afternoon trade.

Bessent also signaled that the Trump administration would be willing to offer Argentina’s government some financial support if a global shock derailed the South American country's economic recovery, the person said, provided that Javier Milei's government stayed the course on reforms and difficulties were not Argentina's fault.

Bessent last week traveled to Buenos Aires to underscore the Trump administration's support for Argentina's reforms and new, $20 billion loan program from the IMF.

Reporting by David Lawder and Andrea Shalal, Editing by Franklin Paul and Andrea Ricci

[admin]

DOGE Is Planning a Hackathon at the IRS. It Wants Easier Access to Taxpayer Data. DOGE operatives have repeatedly referred to the software company Palantir as a possible partner in creating a “mega API” at the IRS, sources tell WIRED.
by Makena Kelly
Wired
Apr 5, 2025 12:03 PM
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackat ... ily_Active

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has plans to stage a “hackathon” next week in Washington, DC. The goal is to create a single “mega API”—a bridge that lets software systems talk to one another—for accessing IRS data, sources tell WIRED. The agency is expected to partner with a third-party vendor to manage certain aspects of the data project. Palantir, a software company cofounded by billionaire and Musk associate Peter Thiel, has been brought up consistently by DOGE representatives as a possible candidate, sources tell WIRED.

Two top DOGE operatives at the IRS, Sam Corcos and Gavin Kliger, are helping to orchestrate the hackathon, sources tell WIRED. Corcos is a health-tech CEO with ties to Musk’s SpaceX. Kliger attended UC Berkeley until 2020 and worked at the AI company Databricks before joining DOGE as a special adviser to the director at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Corcos is also a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Since joining Musk’s DOGE, Corcos has told IRS workers that he wants to pause all engineering work and cancel current attempts to modernize the agency’s systems, according to sources with direct knowledge who spoke with WIRED. He has also spoken about some aspects of these cuts publicly: "We've so far stopped work and cut about $1.5 billion from the modernization budget. Mostly projects that were going to continue to put us down the death spiral of complexity in our code base," Corcos told Laura Ingraham on Fox News in March.

Corcos has discussed plans for DOGE to build “one new API to rule them all,” making IRS data more easily accessible for cloud platforms, sources say. APIs, or application programming interfaces, enable different applications to exchange data, and could be used to move IRS data into the cloud. The cloud platform could become the “read center of all IRS systems,” a source with direct knowledge tells WIRED, meaning anyone with access could view and possibly manipulate all IRS data in one place.

Over the past few weeks, DOGE has requested the names of the IRS’s best engineers from agency staffers. Next week, DOGE and IRS leadership are expected to host dozens of engineers in DC so they can begin “ripping up the old systems” and building the API, an IRS engineering source tells WIRED. The goal is to have this task completed within 30 days. Sources say there have been multiple discussions about involving third-party cloud and software providers like Palantir in the implementation.

Corcos and DOGE indicated to IRS employees that they intended to first apply the API to the agency’s mainframes and then move on to every other internal system. Initiating a plan like this would likely touch all data within the IRS, including taxpayer names, addresses, social security numbers, as well as tax return and employment data. Currently, the IRS runs on dozens of disparate systems housed in on-premises data centers and in the cloud that are purposefully compartmentalized. Accessing these systems requires special permissions and workers are typically only granted access on a need-to-know basis.

A “mega API” could potentially allow someone with access to export all IRS data to the systems of their choosing, including private entities. If that person also had access to other interoperable datasets at separate government agencies, they could compare them against IRS data for their own purposes.

“Schematizing this data and understanding it would take years,” an IRS source tells WIRED. “Just even thinking through the data would take a long time, because these people have no experience, not only in government, but in the IRS or with taxes or anything else.” (“There is a lot of stuff that I don't know that I am learning now,” Corcos tells Ingraham in the Fox interview. “I know a lot about software systems, that's why I was brought in.")

These systems have all gone through a tedious approval process to ensure the security of taxpayer data. Whatever may replace them would likely still need to be properly vetted, sources tell WIRED.

"It's basically an open door controlled by Musk for all Americans’ most sensitive information with none of the rules that normally secure that data," an IRS worker alleges to WIRED.

The data consolidation effort aligns with President Donald Trump’s executive order from March 20, which directed agencies to eliminate information silos. While the order was purportedly aimed at fighting fraud and waste, it also could threaten privacy by consolidating personal data housed on different systems into a central repository, WIRED previously reported.

In a statement provided to WIRED on Saturday, a Treasury spokesperson said the department “is pleased to have gathered a team of longtime IRS engineers who have been identified as the most talented technical personnel. Through this coalition, they will streamline IRS systems to create the most efficient service for the American taxpayer. This week the team will be participating in the IRS Roadmapping Kickoff, a seminar of various strategy sessions, as they work diligently to create efficient systems. This new leadership and direction will maximize their capabilities and serve as the tech-enabled force multiplier that the IRS has needed for decades.”

Palantir, Sam Corcos, and Gavin Kliger did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In February, a memo was drafted to provide Kliger with access to personal taxpayer data at the IRS, The Washington Post reported. Kliger was ultimately provided read-only access to anonymized tax data, similar to what academics use for research. Weeks later, Corcos arrived, demanding detailed taxpayer and vendor information as a means of combating fraud, according to the Post.

“The IRS has some pretty legacy infrastructure. It's actually very similar to what banks have been using. It's old mainframes running COBOL and Assembly and the challenge has been, how do we migrate that to a modern system?” Corcos told Ingraham in the same Fox News interview. Corcos said he plans to continue his work at IRS for a total of six months.

DOGE has already slashed and burned modernization projects at other agencies, replacing them with smaller teams and tighter timelines. At the Social Security Administration, DOGE representatives are planning to move all of the agency’s data off of legacy programming languages like COBOL and into something like Java, WIRED reported last week.

Last Friday, DOGE suddenly placed around 50 IRS technologists on administrative leave. On Thursday, even more technologists were cut, including the director of cybersecurity architecture and implementation, deputy chief information security officer, and acting director of security risk management. IRS’s chief technology officer, Kaschit Pandya, is one of the few technology officials left at the agency, sources say.

DOGE originally expected the API project to take a year, multiple IRS sources say, but that timeline has shortened dramatically down to a few weeks. “That is not only not technically possible, that's also not a reasonable idea, that will cripple the IRS,” an IRS employee source tells WIRED. “It will also potentially endanger filing season next year, because obviously all these other systems they’re pulling people away from are important.”

(Corcos also made it clear to IRS employees that he wanted to kill the agency’s Direct File program, the IRS’s recently released free tax-filing service.)

DOGE’s focus on obtaining and moving sensitive IRS data to a central viewing platform has spooked privacy and civil liberties experts.

“It’s hard to imagine more sensitive data than the financial information the IRS holds,” Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital civil rights organization, tells WIRED.

Palantir received the highest FedRAMP approval this past December for its entire product suite, including Palantir Federal Cloud Service which provides a cloud environment for federal agencies to implement the company’s software platforms, like Gotham and Foundry. FedRAMP stands for Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program and assesses cloud products for security risks before governmental use.

“We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren't working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off.”

[admin]

Judge Blocks DOGE From Laying Off 90 Percent of CFPB. The Trump administration and DOGE tried to cut more than 1,400 employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. An employee union and other groups are fighting to keep the regulator intact.
by Paresh Dave
Wired
Apr 18, 2025 2:41 PM
https://www.wired.com/story/cfpb-termin ... ily_Active

Over 1,400 employees who were about to be laid off from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) will be able to keep working for at least another week after a federal judge intervened in the dismantling of the independent regulator on Friday.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, DC, said the Trump administration could not move forward with the layoffs, which hit roughly 90 percent of the agency, until it presents more evidence about how the terminations have been carried out. The employees learned on Thursday that they were going to lose access to agency systems the following evening and their final date of employment would be June 16. Now, a hearing on the matter is scheduled for April 28. Jackson had previously issued a ruling slowing the firings of probationary employees at the CFPB in February.

Since its establishment by Congress in 2010, the CFPB has helped consumers fight banks and other companies over dubious fees, racial discrimination in lending, and a number of scams. But some conservatives have called for the agency to be dismantled to limit the regulation of businesses, and some companies, including tech giants, have questioned its expanding oversight. This week, an agency official told staff that cases on medical debt, student loans, consumer data, and digital payments would be de-prioritized.

Groups including the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents part of the CFPB workforce, sued the Trump administration in February in an effort to preserve the agency after its acting director, Russell Vought, sought to lay off workers and bring some projects to a stop. That prompted judge Jackson’s initial ruling calling for a pause on the initial cuts until the Trump administration provided more information. Part of her ruling was overturned by an appellate court, and the Trump administration also could appeal her order from Friday blocking the widespread layoffs.

For the time being, two current CFPB employees say they are continuing to work on their cases, including ongoing litigation.

In a court filing to Jackson on Friday, an anonymous employee said Gavin Kliger, a member of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, managed the disputed layoffs of nearly 1,500 workers. “He kept the team up for 36 hours straight to ensure that the notices would go out yesterday (April 17),” the anonymous worker wrote. “Gavin was screaming at people he did not believe were working fast enough to ensure they could go out on this compressed timeline, calling them incompetent.”

Mark Paoletta, the agency’s chief legal officer, wrote in a separate filing on Friday that he and two other CFPB attorneys assessed “line by line” how to “right-size” the bureau. They determined that about 207 employees would be sufficient to carry out duties required by law, according to the filing, which justified laying off the rest of the agency’s roughly 1,700 employees.

“Leadership has discovered many instances in which the Bureau’s activities have pushed well beyond the limits of the law,” Paoletta wrote, citing cases pursued “without the slightest evidence of intentional discrimination” and “into new areas beyond its jurisdiction such as peer-to-peer lending, rent-to-own, and discrimination as unfair practice.”

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DOGE Is Building a Master Database to Surveil and Track Immigrants. DOGE is knitting together data from the Department of Homeland Security, Social Security Administration, and IRS that could create a surveillance tool of unprecedented scope.
by Makena Kelly Vittoria Elliott
Wired
Apr 18, 2025 5:48 PM
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-collec ... ily_Active

Operatives from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are building a master database at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that could track and surveil undocumented immigrants, two sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED.

DOGE is knitting together immigration databases from across DHS and uploading data from outside agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA), as well as voting records, sources say. This, experts tell WIRED, could create a system that could later be searched to identify and surveil immigrants.

The scale at which DOGE is seeking to interconnect data, including sensitive biometric data, has never been done before, raising alarms with experts who fear it may lead to disastrous privacy violations for citizens, certified foreign workers, and undocumented immigrants.

A United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) data lake, or centralized repository, existed at DHS prior to DOGE that included data related to immigration cases, like requests for benefits, supporting evidence in immigration cases, and whether an application has been received and is pending, approved, or denied. Since at least mid-March, however, DOGE has been uploading mass amounts of data to this preexisting USCIS data lake, including data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), SSA, and voting data from Pennsylvania and Florida, two DHS sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED.

“They are trying to amass a huge amount of data,” a senior DHS official tells WIRED. “It has nothing to do with finding fraud or wasteful spending … They are already cross-referencing immigration with SSA and IRS as well as voter data.”

Since president Donald Trump’s return to the White House earlier this year, WIRED and other outlets have reported extensively on DOGE’s attempts to gain unprecedented access to government data, but until recently little has been publicly known about the purpose of such requests or how they would be processed. Reporting from The New York Times and The Washington Post has made clear that one aim is to cross-reference datasets and leverage access to sensitive SSA systems to effectively cut immigrants off from participating in the economy, which the administration hopes would force them to leave the county. The scope of DOGE’s efforts to support the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown appear to be far broader than this, though. Among other things, it seems to involve centralizing immigrant-related data from across the government to surveil, geolocate, and track targeted immigrants in near real time.

DHS and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

DOGE’s collection of personal data on immigrants around the US has dovetailed with the Trump administration’s continued immigration crackdown. “Our administration will not rest until every single violent illegal alien is removed from our country,” Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, said in a press conference on Tuesday.

On Thursday, Gerald Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia and ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to the SSA office of the inspector general stating that representatives have spoken with an agency whistleblower who has warned them that DOGE was building a “master database” containing SSA, IRS, and HHS data.

“The committee is in possession of multiple verifiable reports showing that DOGE has exfiltrated sensitive government data across agencies for unknown purposes,” a senior oversight committee aide claims to WIRED. “Also concerning, a pattern of technical malfeasance has emerged, showing these DOGE staffers are not abiding by our nation’s privacy and cybersecurity laws and their actions are more in line with tactics used by adversaries waging an attack on US government systems. They are using excessive and unprecedented system access to intentionally cover their tracks and avoid oversight so they can creep on Americans’ data from the shadows.”

“There's a reason these systems are siloed,” says Victoria Noble, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “When you put all of an agency's data into a central repository that everyone within an agency or even other agencies can access, you end up dramatically increasing the risk that this information will be accessed by people who don't need it and are using it for improper reasons or repressive goals, to weaponize the information, use it against people they dislike, dissidents, surveil immigrants or other groups.”

One of DOGE’s primary hurdles to creating a searchable data lake has been obtaining access to agency data. Even within an agency like DHS, there are several disparate pools of data across ICE, USCIS, Customs and Border Protection, and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). Though some access is shared, particularly for law enforcement purposes, these pools have not historically been commingled by default because the data is only meant to be used for specific purposes, experts tell WIRED. ICE and HSI, for instance, are law enforcement bodies and sometimes need court orders to access an individual's information for criminal investigations, whereas USCIS collects sensitive information as part of the regular course of issuing visas and green cards.

DOGE operatives Edward Coristine, Kyle Schutt, Aram Moghaddassi, and Payton Rehling have already been granted access to systems at USCIS, FedScoop reported earlier this month. The USCIS databases contain information on refugees and asylum seekers and possibly data on green card holders, naturalized US citizens, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, a DHS source familiar tells WIRED.

DOGE wants to upload information to the data lake from myUSCIS, the online portal where immigrants can file petitions, communicate with USCIS, view their application history, and respond to requests for evidence supporting their case, two DHS sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED. In combination with IP address information from immigrants that sources tell WIRED that DOGE also wants, this data could be used to aid in geolocating undocumented immigrants, experts say.

Voting data, at least from Pennsylvania and Florida, appears to also have also been uploaded to the USCIS data lake. In the case of Pennsylvania, two DHS sources tell WIRED that it is being joined with biometric data from USCIS’s Customer Profile Management System, identified on the DHS’s website as a “person-centric repository of biometric and associated biographic information provided by applicants, petitioners, requestors, and beneficiaries” who have been “issued a secure card or travel document identifying the receipt of an immigration benefit.”

“DHS, for good reason, has always been very careful about sharing data,” says a former DHS staff member who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “Seeing this change is very jarring. The systemization of it all is what gets scary, in my opinion, because it could allow the government to go after real or perceived enemies or ‘aliens; ‘enemy aliens.’”

While government agencies frequently share data, this process is documented and limited to specific purposes, according to experts. Still, the consolidation appears to have administration buy-in: On March 20, President Trump signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to facilitate “both the intra- and inter-agency sharing and consolidation of unclassified agency records.” DOGE officials and Trump administration agency leaders have also suggested centralizing all government data into one single repository. “As you think about the future of AI, in order to think about using any of these tools at scale, we gotta get our data in one place," General Services Administration acting administrator Stephen Ehikian said in a town hall meeting on March 20. In an interview with Fox News in March, Airbnb cofounder and DOGE member Joe Gebbia asserted that this kind of data sharing would create an “Apple-like store experience” of government services.

According to the former staffer, it was historically “extremely hard” to get access to data that DHS already owned across its different departments. A combined data lake would “represent significant departure in data norms and policies.” But, they say, “it’s easier to do this with data that DHS controls” than to try to combine it with sensitive data from other agencies, because accessing data from other agencies can have even more barriers.

That hasn’t stopped DOGE operatives from spending the last few months requesting access to immigration information that was, until recently, siloed across different government agencies. According to documents filed in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO v. Social Security Administration lawsuit on March 15, members of DOGE who were stationed at SSA requested access to the USCIS database, SAVE, a system for local and state governments, as well as the federal government, to verify a person’s immigration status.

According to two DHS sources with direct knowledge, the SSA data was uploaded to the USCIS system on March 24, only nine days after DOGE received access to SSA’s sensitive government data systems. An SSA source tells WIRED that the types of information are consistent with the agency's Numident database, which is the file of information contained in a social security number application. The Numident record would include a person’s social security number, full names, birthdates, citizenship, race, ethnicity, sex, mother’s maiden name, an alien number, and more.

Oversight for the protection of this data also appears to now be more limited. In March, DHS announced cuts to the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, all key offices that were significant guards against misuse of data. “We didn't make a move in the data world without talking to the CRCL,” says the former DHS employee.

CRCL, which investigates possible rights abuses by DHS and whose creation was mandated by Congress, had been a particular target of DOGE. According to ProPublica, in a February meeting with the CRCL team, Schutt said, “This whole program sounds like money laundering.”

Schutt did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Musk loyalists and DOGE operatives have spoken at length about parsing government data to find instances of supposed illegal immigration. Antonio Gracias, who according to Politico is leading DOGE’s “immigration task force,” told Fox and Friends that DOGE was looking at voter data as it relates to undocumented immigrants. “Just because we were curious, we then looked to see if they were on the voter rolls,” he said. “And we found in a handful of cooperative states that there were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted.” (Very few noncitizens voted in the 2024 election, and naturalized immigrants were more likely to vote Republican.) Gracias is also part of the DOGE team at SSA and founded the investment firm Valor Equity Partners. He also worked with Musk for many years at Tesla and helped the centibillionaire take the company public.

“As part of their fixation on this conspiracy theory that undocumented people are voting, they're also pulling in tens of thousands, millions of US citizens who did nothing more than vote or file for Social Security benefits,” Cody Venzke, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union focused on privacy and surveillance, tells WIRED. “It's a massive dragnet that's going to have all sorts of downstream consequences for not just undocumented people but US citizens and people who are entitled to be here as well.”

Over the past few weeks, DOGE leadership within the IRS have orchestrated a “hackathon” aimed at plotting out a “mega API” allowing privileged users to view all agency data from a central access point. Sources tell WIRED the project will likely be hosted on Foundry, software developed by Palantir, a company cofounded by Musk ally and billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. An API is an application programming interface that allows different software systems to exchange data. While the Treasury Department has denied the existence of a contract for this work, IRS engineers were invited to another three-day “training and building session” on the project located at Palantir’s Georgetown offices in Washington, DC, this week, according to a document viewed by WIRED.

“Building it out as a series of APIs they can connect to is more feasible and quicker than putting all the data in a single place, which is probably what they really want,” one SSA source tells WIRED.

On April 5, DHS struck an agreement with the IRS to use tax data to search for more than seven million migrants working and living in the US. ICE has also recently paid Palantir millions of dollars to update and modify an ICE database focused on tracking down immigrants, 404 Media reported.

Multiple current and former government IT sources tell WIRED that it would be easy to connect the IRS’s Palantir system with the ICE system at DHS, allowing users to query data from both systems simultaneously. A system like the one being created at the IRS with Palantir could enable near-instantaneous access to tax information for use by DHS and immigration enforcement. It could also be leveraged to share and query data from different agencies as well, including immigration data from DHS. Other DHS sub-agencies, like USCIS, use Databricks software to organize and search its data, but these could be connected to outside Foundry instances simply as well, experts say. Last month, Palantir and Databricks struck a deal making the two software platforms more interoperable.

“I think it's hard to overstate what a significant departure this is and the reshaping of longstanding norms and expectations that people have about what the government does with their data,” says Elizabeth Laird, director of equity in civic technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology, who noted that agencies trying to match different datasets can also lead to errors. “You have false positives and you have false negatives. But in this case, you know, a false positive where you're saying someone should be targeted for deportation.”

Mistakes in the context of immigration can have devastating consequences: In March, authorities arrested and deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, due to, the Trump administration says, “an administrative error.” Still, the administration has refused to bring Abrego Garcia back, defying a Supreme Court ruling.

“The ultimate concern is a panopticon of a single federal database with everything that the government knows about every single person in this country,” Venzke says. “What we are seeing is likely the first step in creating that centralized dossier on everyone in this country.”

Updated: 4/25/2025, 12:45 pm EDT: In a statement, a Treasury official said that IRS data wasn't being used 'inappropriately,' but did not dispute Wired's reporting: “Congress has been very clear about the limited exceptions in which taxpayer information can be shared. The implication that taxpayer information is being inappropriately shared across government agencies is not only incorrect but dangerous."