"In its actions, if not in its rhetoric, the Biden White House operated according to this logic: that American global hegemony is more important than the survival of Earth as a habitable planet for humans."
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/biden-gaza-legacy-foreign-policy/
In many ways, Biden and Trump have similar views, namely that America should be the world's singular hyper-power which dominates China and all other countries for its own benefit.
If those countries won't cooperate then they will be economically blockaded, to the extent such a thing is possible and not merely self-destructive in the current globalized environment.
Any moral or legal issues or hypocrisy are secondary to the advancement of US imperial authority and control over resources.
Part of the problem with this whole way of thinking, aside from its amorality and its fixation on American hegemony over all other concerns like climate, is it's just another version of trickle-down.
"If we ban our competitors or make them prohibitively expensive through tariffs then US firms will eventually fill the void and create great new jobs without us having to do anything."
That doesn't work, it's never worked, and it can't work in this environment.
There is "AI," for example, something else Biden and many Democrats are obsessed with.
US companies aren't trying to make the best product or even a workable product; they're just trying to soak up investor cash for a short-term payout.
The response to DeepSeek won't be a scramble to innovate, it will be a rush to ban it and an attempt to further strangle Chinese access to processors.
This complacency is exactly how the US lost the electronics race to Japan in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
Also, if you really want to promote green energy and electric vehicles and spur innovation, you would open up markets to competition and absorb good ideas and products from elsewhere.
Instead, Biden slapped high tariffs on Chinese EVs in order to protect domestic companies like Tesla, which are basically bubble-driven shell companies.
There is also the political problem: most Americans don't actually care where their stuff comes from as long as it's cheap.
But Biden, like Trump, is obsessed with the idea of a manufacturing renaissance powered by US global hegemony when the US is already a leading exporter.
It's just automation means factories don't require that many workers, and there is no way to shoehorn more jobs in there without being less competitive.
It also costs more to manufacture things here, if we can make them at all, which is why we off-shored what we did. And again, Americans don't actually care as long as shit is cheap.
@gwynnion Still gobsmacked by this tidbit, although really I shouldn't be:
David Shor, whose firm Blue Rose Research played a major role in vetting ads for the super PAC Future Forward, which had a budget of $950 million to support Kamala Harris’s campaign, tweeted in 2021: “I would much rather live in a world where we see a 4-degree rise in temperature than live in a world where China is a global hegemon.”
@gwynnion Oh wow. He's a fucking kid.
And his wikipedia page doesn't mention this tweet. I think it should. But I don't have enough edit history (i.e.: I have none) to make that stick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shor
@SallyStrange RIGHT?!
This point of view was being espoused very early on in the Biden administration, too. Matthew Yglesias was advocating for one billion Americans as a way of competing with China, as if that makes any sense, and you can imagine what steps might be necessary to force Americans to have that many children.
People who say shit like that have NO FUCKING IDEA AT ALL what +4C would do to us. None.
@violetmadder @SallyStrange @gwynnion
Holy crap.
"I would rather have mass levels of death and starvation than risk living in a world where the white man isn't on top"
Is that a right interpretation there?
Yes. Yes, it is.
+4C puts us more than halfway to the opposite of an ice age-- in the space of a geological eyeblink.
Most of the planet would be rendered unrecognizable. Swaths near the equator would become uninhabitable wasteland regularly hitting temperatures well above wet bulb, where photosynthesis isn't even possible. Billions of people, that's billions with a B, would die.
Nordhaus called it economically "ideal".
When I first read about it, I got dizzy and had to sit with my head in my hands for a long while.
Because that's when I realized a planetwide apocalypse fit to send us back to the stone age is actually ACCEPTABLE to these bastards, and they're not even going to bother to TRY to hit the brakes on climate change. They will merrily send everybody and everything straight to hell if we don't stop them.
"Americans don't actually care as long as shit is cheap"
That's true because for the last fifty years Americans have been bombarded with advertising on one side (which works more than people like to admit) and increased cost of living on the other.
I don't know how we could undo the damage of all of the advertising. But I suspect you could get more people to buy domestic products if we had universal healthcare and a $22/hour minimum wage.
The genocide in Gaza spoke louder than any Western politician or any campaign speech.
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