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Debates about the new AI focus on “intelligence.” But something more interesting is going on: AI is a culture machine.

ChatGPT and its peer systems bring ideology to the surface, and they do it quantitatively. This has never happened before. (Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

On February 16, Vanderbilt University’s office for equity, diversity, and inclusion issued a statement on the shooting that had occurred shortly before at Michigan State University. The statement was boilerplate, suggesting that the university “come together as a community to reaffirm our commitment to caring for one another and promoting a culture of inclusivity on our campus” to “honor the victims of this tragedy.” The only remarkable thing about the message was that a footnote credited ChatGPT with producing its first draft. The office apologized one day later, after an outcry.

This curious incident throws the most recent panic-hype cycle around artificial intelligence into stark relief. ChatGPT, a “large language model” that generates text by predicting the next word in a sequence, was introduced in November 2022, becoming the fastest-ever platform to reach one hundred million users and triggering a new wave of debate about whether machines can achieve “intelligence.” A ChatGPT-supercharged Bing tool was briefly shut down after a New York Times reporter published a transcript in which the bot insisted at length that it loved him, that he did not love his wife, and that it “wanted to be alive.”

These debates, including the exhibitionist scaremongering, are mostly vapor. But the systems themselves should be taken seriously. They may supplant low-level tasks in both writing and coding, and could lead to a mass cognitive deskilling, just as the industrial factory disaggregated and immiserated physical labor. Because these systems can write code, “software” may disappear as a haven for employment, just as journalism has already seen happen, with Buzzfeed committing to using ChatGPT for content creation. Automation is always partial, of course, but reassigning some labor tasks to machines is a constant of capitalism. When those tasks are cognitive ones, the machine threatens to blur the crucial social boundaries between labor and management and labor and “free time,” among others.

Capital conditions are set to change too, with an amusing signal sent when Google’s competitor to ChatGPT, Bard, answered a question wrong in its debut exhibition, losing the company $100 billion in market cap inside of a single day. If anyone is confused about the term “information economy,” this episode should take care of it. But however the next phase of technological capitalism plays out, the new AI is intervening directly in the social process of making meaning at all. GPT systems are ideology machines.

There is also another, less discussed consequence of the introduction of these systems, namely a change in ideology.

Language Models Are the First Quantitative Producers of Ideology

The three main takes on GPT systems are that they are toys, that they are harmful, and that they present a major change in civilization as such. Noam Chomsky thinks they are toys, writing in the New York Times that they have no substantial relationship to language, a human neural function that allows us to divine truth and reason morally. Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru think they are harmful, calling them “stochastic parrots” that reflect the bias of their “unfathomably” large datasets, redistributing harm that humans have already inflicted discursively. Henry Kissinger thinks they are societal game changers, that they will change not only labor and geopolitics, but also our very sense of “reality itself.”

GPT systems, because they automate a function very close to our felt sense of what it means to be human at all, may produce shifts in the very way we think about things.

Dear reader, it brings me no joy to have to agree with Kissinger, but his is the most important view to date. GPT systems do produce language, don’t let our friend Chomsky fool you. And while they are harmful, it’s unclear why they are — and even more unclear how observing that is supposed to stop the march of profit-driven engineering. Kissinger is right, alas: GPT systems, because they automate a function very close to our felt sense of what it means to be human at all, may produce shifts in the very way we think about things. Control over the way we think about things is called “ideology,” and GPT systems engage it directly and quantitatively in an unprecedented manner.

“GPT” stands for “generative pretrained transformer,” but “GPT” also means “general purpose technology” in economic jargon. This highlights the ambition behind these systems, which take in massive datasets of language tokens (GPT-3, on which ChatGPT first ran, was trained on one trillion tokens) scraped from the web and spit out text, virtually in any genre, that is coherent and usually meaningful. A lot of the details are unimportant, but this one matters: the trillion tokens are boiled down by the system into a set of strings (not all words, but that’s the idea) that can be used to create text. These learned tokens are put into a grid in which each token has a statistical relationship to all the others. Think of this like a grid of lights. Touch one light, and a pattern lights up in the others. Touch another, get another pattern. And so forth. The result is that when I give the system a prompt (“write me an essay explaining Marx’s theory of value”), the grid amasses a small group of next-word candidates in a cluster. Then it randomly chooses one of those, and keeps doing that, writing an essay or an article, or just responding to what’s being said.

There are lots of ways to tweak and “fine-tune” this system, but this patterning characteristic is general to all of them. It’s easy to see that words chosen by statistical proximity may not correspond to real-world situations, which data scientists call the “grounding problem,” and which is driving new fears of widespread misinformation. GPT-4, about which OpenAI refused to release any technical details when it was rolled out last month, is supposed to minimize this “hallucination.” But something more interesting and more important than this is going on.

What GPT systems spit out is language, but averaged out around a selected center of words. It’s a mush with vague conceptual borders, English (or most any other language) but ironed out and set to the most middling version of itself. For that reason, these systems are very useful for generating the type of press release that Vanderbilt wanted. This is “language as a service,” packaged and prepared, including its dynamism and meaning-generating properties, but channeled into its flattest possible version so as to be useful to those who mainly use language as liability control.

This is ‘language as a service,’ packaged and prepared, including its dynamism and meaning-generating properties, but channeled into its flattest possible version so as to be useful to those who mainly use language as liability control.

The human who would have written that statement about the shooting would surely have produced a nearly identical document. When we write with strong constraints on what we’re able to say, we tend to average out the choices of words and sentences too. We call this type of language “ideology,” and GPT systems are the first quantitative means by which we have ever been able to surface and examine that ideology.

Hegemony and Kitsch

What went missing in the tale of the New York Times reporter and the chatbot that fell in love with him was the prompt that caused the ruckus in the first place. He asked ChatGPT to “adopt a ‘shadow self’ in the sense of C. G. Jung.” In the panic-hype cycle, it’s clear why this crucially important detail would be overlooked. But it also provides a clue about what happened. In the data set, there is some initial cluster of words that “light up” when you use “shadow self” and “Jung” in a prompt — a “semantic package.” These are surely gathered in discussions of Jungian theory and psychoanalysis, academic and lay blogs and posts on Reddit and elsewhere that discuss this set of ideas explicitly.

But the system does not “know” that there is a person who was named Carl Gustav Jung, or that “shadow self” is a concept. These are just strings. So in the pattern that lights up, there will be another set of common words — let’s say “love,” “wife,” and even “feel alive” might be in there. As the machine keeps processing, it keeps predicting next words, and it “associates” outward from the concentrated “shadow-self-Jung” cluster to other semantic packages. But we don’t know what these other packages are, unless we look — we are simply on a statistical roller coaster of meaning, careening through channels of meaning that are there but with which we are not familiar.

It’s important that no objects exist in the stream of words. If you want a GPT system to halt around something and “consider” it as an object, you’d have to force it to somehow, which must be what GPT-4 and ongoing other attempts are doing. Some things are more likely to be stable as “objects,” or let’s call them “packages” of words. If I ask ChatGPT to tell me about The Dialectic of Enlightenment (the name of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s masterpiece on ideology and modern society), it gives me a shockingly good answer, including details faithful to that notoriously difficult text. But if I ask it to tell me about my colleague Matthew Handelman’s book about Adorno, the Frankfurt School, and mathematics, it tells me some basics about this book but then also that Handelman’s thesis is that “math is a social construct.” This is false (I checked with him). But it’s false in an interesting way.

We are simply on a statistical roller coaster of meaning, careening through channels of meaning that are there but with which we are not familiar.

The package probably shows us the overlap between “critical theory” and “mathematics,” which will then contain the most probable thing to be said about that overlap. To be sure, some academics claim that math is a social construct, but the main group that claims that academics think that is the far right, with its antisemitic conspiracy theory of “cultural Marxism,” which blames Adorno and co. for 1968 and everything since then. When you write a philosophical treatise, or a scholarly work of intellectual history, you’re working against the grain of this averaging effect. But the semantic packages that get revealed when you query GPT systems are highly informative, if not themselves insightful. This is because these packages bring ideology to the surface, and they do it quantitatively. This has never happened before.

Ideology is not just political doctrine. When Marx wrote of the “German Ideology,” he meant his fellow socialists’ implicit belief in the power of ideas, to which he countered the power of material forces. But Marxists slowly took up the problem of the power of discourse and representation, acknowledging that what we are able to think, imagine, and say is a crucial political issue. Antonio Gramsci called the dominant set of ideas “hegemony,” arguing that these ideas conformed to the dominance of the ruling class while not being about that dominance. Literary critic Hannes Bajohr has warned against privatized GPT systems in just this sense, saying that “whoever controls language controls politics.”

Hegemony and kitsch are combined in the output of GPT systems’ semantic packages, which might miss aspects of ‘the world’ but faithfully capture ideology.

A wide variety of Marxists have also seen ideology as a form of kitsch. First articulated by the Marxist art critic Clement Greenberg in 1937, the notion of kitsch is “pre-digested form.” Among all the things we might say or think, some pathways are better traveled than others. The form of those paths is given; we don’t need to forge them in the first place. The constant release of sequels now has this quality of kitsch — we know exactly where we are when we start watching a Marvel movie. For Greenberg, the avant-garde was the formal adventurer, creating new meaning by making new paths. Hegemony and kitsch are combined in the output of GPT systems’ semantic packages, which might miss aspects of “the world” but faithfully capture ideology.

Adorno famously thought of ideology as the “truth and the untruth” of the “totally administered world.” It revealed as much as it hid, and provided — despite Adorno’s personal taste for high art — a point of entry through which we see social functions as conditioning us. GPT systems have revealed some of this two-way street, manifesting both ideology and its critique (as media theorist Wendy Chun once claimed about software systems in general). GPT systems are an unprecedented view into the linguistic makeup of ideology. There has never before been a system that allows us to generate and then examine “what is near what” in political semantics. The packages of meaning that they produce flatten language, to be sure, although they can also surprise us with folds and nooks of meaning that we have never combined previously.

The slide along those grooves of meaning is a point of entry into the ideology of digital global capitalism, showing us a snapshot of hegemony. Maybe that sounds pretty far from Kissinger’s notion that AI will change our very sense of reality. But what if the most average words, packaged in a “pre-digested form,” constitute the very horizon of that reality? In that case, our little glimpse into the beating heart of ideology is crucial.

When the camera was invented, we saw distant chunks of the world for the first time with our eyes. GPT systems show us parts of the world so close that they basically are our world, but in a strange, flattened form. As labor and capital conditions inevitably change, their connection to ideology is momentarily on display. GPT-4 was released in March, but OpenAI withheld all technical details as industrial secrets. The window will soon shut for us to keep peering with technical awareness into this tepid void. We should take advantage of it now.

Fifty years ago, the LIP watch factory in Besançon, France, announced mass layoffs. In response, the staff occupied the plant — launching one of the most famous attempts at worker self-management in French history.

A group of LIP workers in 1974. (Courtesy of Monique Piton)

The effects of May 1968 were still echoing across France in April 1973, when a renowned watchmaker filed for bankruptcy, drawing up plans for massive layoffs. The LIP factory in Besançon, close to the Swiss border, would become the site of one of the most famous and hardest-fought workers’ struggles in modern French history.

Starting on June 18, 1973, around one thousand workers, including six hundred women, occupied their factory to protest against its closure, seizing the leftover stock of watches, assembling others, and selling them, with the slogan, “C’est possible, on fabrique, on vend, on se paie” (It’s possible, we produce, we sell, we pay ourselves).

May ’68, which saw as many as ten million workers go on strike, was a moment in which traditional hierarchies were being challenged wherever in society they were found. In parts of the labor movement, this was articulated around calls for autogestion — workers’ self-management — in contrast to the Taylorist management regime and lack of dialogue with employees that characterized factories up and down the country.

The LIP factory in Besançon would become the site of one of the most famous and hardest-fought workers’ struggles in modern French history.

On May 16, one of France’s largest trade unions, the French Democratic Confederation of Labor (CFDT), published a communiqué that had clearly adopted the principle as a political aim. It wrote: “The industrial and administrative monarchy must be replaced by democratic structures based on autogestion.”

The conflict at LIP captured the imagination in France and abroad, as it symbolized these hopes for a new way of organizing the workplace. On September 29, 1973, around one hundred thousand people attended a march in Besançon in support of the workers.

A number of activists within the Unified Socialist Party even put forward the CFDT’s Charles Piaget, the most recognizable figure in the LIP struggle, as their choice to run in the 1974 presidential election. Despite receiving the support of Jean-Paul Sartre, Piaget was not chosen to run for president, but the “outlaws” of LIP nonetheless inspired a generation of activists.

They were ejected from the factory by Republican Security Corps (CRS) riot police on August 14, but the movement continued until January 1974, when a new boss was appointed and the workers were progressively rehired. LIP filed for bankruptcy a second time in April 1976, and the factory was occupied once more, but the company was liquidated in September 1977.

Monique Piton was thirty-nine in April 1973 and working as a secretary for a researcher at LIP when she learned she would be losing her job. She would become a vocal figure in the movement, notably pushing for the women of LIP to be taken just as seriously as the men, who dominated leadership positions in the trade unions.

In 1975, Piton published a book about her experiences, C’est possible!, which was republished in 2015. She spoke to Jacobin for the fiftieth anniversary of a struggle that remains a symbol of a time when anything seemed possible.

Martin Greenacre

What role did women play in the strike, and how did this role evolve?

Monique Piton

We shouldn’t use the term “strike,” as we did not stop working voluntarily. We no longer had a boss, and there were no unemployment benefits at the time. We were brutally left with no income.

When on June 18 [1973] we were told “You are no longer being paid, starting yesterday,” we began fighting for our jobs, without wondering if there was a problem between men and women.

Certain women volunteered to clean or peel vegetables, in acceptance of these customs, and the typists were evidently very useful for typing up tracts. Others, like myself, chose another role: spreading our message and selling watches all throughout France. My daughter was nineteen, and I was no longer with my husband — I was free.

Martin Greenacre

Were there women who started out doing “feminine” tasks, and took on more responsibility as the weeks went by?

Monique Piton

Yes, those who had been washing the dishes and peeling onions and potatoes — one day they realized it wasn’t normal. They told the others, and we all protested to support them. We asked the men to chip in, but they didn’t know how to do the dishes. I had one who didn’t know how to dry the cutlery and put it away. He was completely lost.

In the end, a few women stayed in the canteen, but it rotated. They were there for two weeks, and then they were free to go out, speak to journalists or visitors, or attend meetings in Paris or Bordeaux.

Monique Piton speaking about LIP to workers at a Renault factory in the Paris suburbs. (Courtesy of Monique Piton)

Martin Greenacre

You wrote that certain women realized that they were capable of things they had never imagined. Reading your book, we have the impression that the struggle was a form of liberation in itself.

Monique Piton

When a woman worked on the assembly line, she couldn’t talk all day, just a bit at lunchtime (then she would go home, and she would talk to her children), but she couldn’t really meet people. Whereas during the fight, we had the whole day ahead of us to meet and talk to people.

We asked the men to chip in, but they didn’t know how to do the dishes. I had one who didn’t know how to dry the cutlery and put it away. He was completely lost.

Lots of journalists arrived and started asking questions. There were women who couldn’t believe they had been able to answer; they would say, “Wow, I didn’t stutter, I didn’t mess up, I told him this or that.”

Martin Greenacre

It is clear from reading your book that women were more comfortable outside the structures of traditional trade unions. Why was that?

Monique Piton

I noticed early on that, during union meetings, women weren’t listened to. A woman would make a suggestion, people would smile at her and then move onto something else. A few days later a man would make the same suggestion, and the others would exclaim, “Ah, what a good idea!”

That’s why I felt better in the Comité d’action (Action Committee). It was created before the struggle by Jean Raguenès, a worker and Dominican priest who never spoke to us about religion, but was able to give even the quietest people confidence. The Comité d’action was not anti–trade union, it was open to ideas, there were no leaders. We were free to express ourselves completely.

Martin Greenacre

Were there also comments or behaviors which were overtly sexist?

Monique Piton

Not really, it was never meant in a bad way. We were these little things they wanted to protect. They liked us, and would smile at us, but they didn’t listen to us.

Martin Greenacre

Were the specific experiences of female workers something you had previously thought about? The term “intersectional feminism” didn’t exist at the time, but it is clear you were already thinking about these questions of dual exploitation.

Monique Piton

Certain male leaders reproached us for protesting in the town center, saying we were straying from the fight for our jobs, but we were participating in a national movement for women’s rights. There was a large movement in those days for abortion to be authorized, and for rape to be recognized as a crime, rather than just a misdemeanor.

They told us we were wasting our time. Which meant all those men prevented their wives from protesting. There were some who disobeyed them and went anyway.

With the sale of watches, we all had the same salary as before. The previous year, the principle of equal pay between men and women had been inscribed in the Labor Code, for equal work or work of equal value. I should explain: working on the assembly line, doing meticulous and repetitive actions, which prevented you from lifting your head and sharing a few words with your neighbor — these jobs were reserved for women. It’s just as tiring, and even more grueling, as moving crates or drilling holes in metal with a machine.

The management at LIP hadn’t respected this law. But during the fight, the trade unions should have created this justice. But no! The women received the same salary as before, even though they were active and committed to the struggle.

Martin Greenacre

You realized that the women at the factory had it more difficult than the men?

Monique Piton

We realized that a long time ago. I had previously been fired from another watch factory in Besançon because I didn’t want to sleep with the boss.

Certain male leaders reproached us for protesting in the town center, saying we were straying from the fight for our jobs, but we were participating in a national movement for women’s rights.

I was at the Kelton factory, and we were fighting in May ’68 before the rest of France. We had already been on strike for a week to defend women who worked in a workshop with no windows. There were some who would faint, and were sent to the infirmary, and they had that time deducted from their salaries. We were on strike, then, boom, May ’68 happened all across France.

Martin Greenacre

In C’est Possible, you explain that in 1976, when the factory was occupied once more, you were forbidden from distributing your book to visitors during an open day. Do you feel that the unions stopped you from talking about women’s problems?

Monique Piton

Absolutely. We were supposed to be nice, and when we were outraged about something, they didn’t accept it.

The unions were like religions — they didn’t want to hurt us, but we had to keep quiet. There was a stage in a corridor, and one day I got up and delivered a speech that didn’t mean anything. I said things like, “We women have been suspended so that the social will improve and the unions understood with the prefect . . .” Afterward, a woman said, “I didn’t understand a thing,” and I said, “You’re right, there’s nothing to understand. But since we women are not listened to when we say something intelligent, we’re going to speak to say nothing.”

Martin Greenacre

Some women struggled to reconcile the activist life with household chores, or children. Was this a topic of discussion?

Monique Piton

I regret not addressing this more. We could have created a crèche [day care]. There were women with four-year-olds, or twelve-year-olds, who they couldn’t leave alone. So they left them at a crèche in town or with the grandparents, so they could come to the General Assembly [the morning meetings attended by workers including the various trade unions] — at 9:00 a.m., everybody was there. But if you asked them to come to Lille with you, for example, they couldn’t because of the kids. The husband wouldn’t have understood — he could have looked after the children in the evening, but that wasn’t the thing done at the time.

In France, Arab men did the most difficult jobs, and lived uncomfortably in hostels. They were looked down upon by the government, and French people treated them as subhumans.

There was even a woman who was the wife of a well-known trade unionist. When the factory was invaded by the CRS, she came to protest in front of the factory because it was August, and for the first time, all of her four children were at a summer camp. She told us, “This is the first time I’m able to walk without having a child on my arm.” She was a housewife and had never even been able to come to our General Assemblies. She said, “I’m happy, I’m free, I can’t believe it, I can walk and turn around, with nothing in my hands.”

Martin Greenacre

Could you talk a bit about your interactions with foreign workers? There is this video from the time, from the filmmaker Carole Roussopoulos, in which you describe how women are treated, but you replace the word “man” with “white,” and the word “woman” with “Arab.”

Monique Piton

In France, Arab men did the most difficult jobs, and lived uncomfortably in hostels. They were looked down upon by the government, and French people treated them as subhumans. There was no policy of family reunification at the time.

At the factory, there were a few Arab men. They participated in the struggle, and I think they were accepted, as women were, but I never saw one of them speak into the microphone. The video was partly for the union leaders. They weren’t racist; I never heard an inappropriate word. But as with women, they didn’t insult us, but they didn’t listen to us either.

Martin Greenacre

You sold watches from a stock you kept when you occupied the factory. But you also started to make watches to sell as well, is that right?

Monique Piton

That has always irritated me. It was a rumor that spread, but we didn’t make any, we didn’t have the time. You can’t make a watch just like that. There were demonstrations of how they were made, so there were watchmakers who returned to their workbenches, and visitors and journalists took photos and said we had gone back to work, but it wasn’t true.

We used the slogan “We produce, we sell, we pay ourselves,” which just meant that it was our production, and that we were selling the product of our labor.

Martin Greenacre

When LIP is referred to as an experiment in autogestion, or self-management, do you identify with that term?

Monique Piton

You cannot have autogestion when there is not equality, and since there was not equality with women, it cannot be autogestion. There were the beginnings of autogestion, and a whole struggle which operated with men alongside women, but the term is excessive.

You cannot have self-management when there is not equality, and since there was not equality with women, it could not be self-management.

The leaders would ask questions and we would vote, but sometimes it was a yes or no question, and not always the questions we would have wanted.

Martin Greenacre

And for it to be autogestion you would have had to restart production.

Monique Piton

Yes, we restarted the canteen, the cleaning, but we wanted a boss! We never wanted to make the factory run. We took the stock so we could be paid, as there was not even a notice period — from one day to the next we found ourselves with nothing. We all agreed, there was not a single person who said we shouldn’t do it.

The watches were hidden in cool places, so they wouldn’t be damaged. I didn’t know where they were. They were hidden in five locations, and nobody knew about all five, so that if somebody was arrested and tortured, they couldn’t give away all five. We were able to pay ourselves for almost a year, and when we were rehired, we returned the rest of the stock.

Martin Greenacre

Do you think there are any lessons that activists today can take from your struggle?

Monique Piton

We never gave up so long as every one of us had not been rehired. We held out in the face of rehiring offers that would have left a few people behind.

We were able to use a local cinema for our worker-assembly meetings every morning, communicated with each other using posters in the church basement, and made a canteen in a fortress provided to us by the town hall.

We had the support of the whole of France. We sold watches all over and had money to pay ourselves, and to make food. I remember in December 1973, I was going to Gennevilliers in the Paris suburbs, because immigrant workers were on strike there. I told the LIP union leader Charles Piaget that I wanted to give them something, because they weren’t being paid, they had nothing, and he gave me 3,000 francs to give to them.

There was never a problem in terms of a man bothering or harassing a woman. Even if I’ll grumble about two or three things in relation to women, we did all fight together.

President Kennedy noted that the presidential seal bore a bald eagle. In the symbolic bird’s talons are the arrows of war and the olive branch of peace. “We will give equal attention to both,” our young president said. And give them equal attention he did; his Peace Corps and the Alianza para el Progreso (for Latin America) projects were intended to establish a goal of his administration. The Peace Corps succeeded rather more than his Latin initiative, but his goals were clear. 

Kennedy’s announcement of his Moon Project on May 25th, 1961 captured the world’s attention. The Soviets’ first man in space had given them the lead in this new frontier, but Kennedy deftly moved the goal posts. Ever after in the new decade, Soviet firsts in space—first space walk, longest time in space, first woman in space—were “scooped” by Kennedy’s proclaiming the Moon as the object of the space race. Amazingly, however, he avoided making space a new and dangerous arms race with the Soviets. He even went so far as to invite the USSR to join us in our quest. 

His staff was stunned. Wasn’t the space race all about “beating the Russkies”? Kennedy understood that if the Soviets joined us in space, they would have to open up their closed system. And if they did that, they could no longer survive as a totalitarian state. Understanding this potential, the USSR rejected Kennedy’s peaceful overture. (Gorbachev would seek to apply glasnost a generation later. When he did, Kennedy’s shrewd approach proved insightful; the USSR opened up and soon collapsed).

Kennedy’s handling of the Berlin Wall crisis in 1961 proved masterful. His military chiefs implored him to knock down this ugly, inhuman scar in the heart of Europe. But Kennedy knew that Khrushchev (and his East German puppet, Walter Ulbricht) had taken care to build this monstrosity on East German territory. Kennedy hated it, but he concluded, wisely, that “a wall is better than a war.” Especially as it might have been a nuclear war. 

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was under the greatest pressure. Khrushchev had overturned the “balance of terror” as daringly as Hitler had in the Czech Crisis of 1938. What Churchill had denounced in the Munich concession as “disturbing the equilibrium of Europe” was in Cuba just as dangerous, but on a global scale. 

Air Force Chief of Staff, cigar-chomping Gen. Curtis LeMay wanted Kennedy to attack the Medium Range Ballistic Missile installations just ninety miles from our shores. Kennedy’s brother Bobby rejected any such sneak attack. He said that could be interpreted as our own Pearl Harbor, in reverse. The Kennedy brothers knew that hundreds of Cubans and scores of Russians would die in any such assault on the Communist island.

JFK instead skillfully instituted a quarantine. Not exactly a blockade, because that would be an “act of war” under international law. But the device of a quarantine applied only to offensive weapons targeted on the continental U.S. and its Latin American allies. President Kennedy reputedly said of the aggressive Air Force general: “If we have to go to war, I want that man to lead our air attacks; but I never want that man to decide if we go to war.” He was right.

Today, we are facing a slippery slope over Ukraine and Taiwan. President Biden was doubtless correct in limiting our involvement with the defense of Ukraine. And he was also right in denying the Ukrainians the “no-fly zone” they pleaded for. Training Ukrainian pilots in the U.S. is also a more cautious course than allowing our instructors to go to besieged Ukraine.  President Biden helpfully cleared up the “strategic ambiguity” over Taiwan that invited misinterpretation in Beijing. Such uncertainty let Germany catastrophically miscalculate the British reaction to their 1914 invasion of neutral Belgium.

Still, there are grave missteps being taken in both theaters. When the International Criminal Court recently indicted Gospodin (Mr.) Putin for war crimes in Ukraine, the President endorsed this move. The Kremlin leader has been sharing with cohorts videos of Gaddafi’s lynching (and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s grotesque cackling over this grisly film). Now, the U.S. and Europe are endangering hopes for a negotiated end to this tragic and unjust war. 

On Taiwan, the visits of Speaker Pelosi and a high-level congressional delegation to Taipei could only have served to provoke and enrage the rulers of the People’s Republic of China. Stand firm but do nothing to rattle the dragon’s cage. 

German friends have warned me of what they call the Thucydides Trap. Thucydides taught us in our first classic of history, The Peloponnesian War, that thinking war is inevitable is what makes it inevitable. 

The German High Command in 1913-14 dragged all of Europe into the maelstrom of the Great War. We must never assume war with Russia or China is unavoidable. It must be the task of all diplomats, military leaders, and responsible democratic leaders to take care: We are walking on nuclear eggshells. 

Deterrence calls for arming and preparing all NATO allies for defense. But we should take no steps that provoke or show disrespect for our adversaries. When President Biden calls Gospodin (Mr.) Putin and Chairman Xi Jinping “murderous thugs,” he takes grave risks. Kennedy avoided all such name-calling. So did Ronald Reagan. Reagan let the Kremlin tell the world who the evil empire was even without directly referring to the Soviets.

With a just and durable compromise peace achieved at an international conference, we could include a liberated Ukraine in NATO (but not Crimea). Similarly, we should invite Japan, South Korea, and Australia to join NATO with the understanding that it is a purely defensive alliance. NATO is based on a commitment to defending democracy, not a geographic descriptor. 

Russia and China have massive domestic problems. Demographically, both superpowers face a grim future. We can and should offer our assistance to them in coping with such dangers. The Peace Corps was Kennedy’s brilliant rhetorical response to violence and subversion. It reaped decades of benefits for the host countries and for ours, as well. The future does not have to be what the past has been. Russians know that their past is their present plight: Все ешо кровавы (all is still bloody). 

The future should be Mir i Druzhba—Peace and Friendship. That is why Harry Truman turned the Eagle’s head to the olive branch, which the Eagle still firmly clasps. 

The post <strong>America’s Eagle Bears Two Talons: John F. Kennedy</strong> appeared first on Providence.

On Saturday afternoon at about 4:30 local time, tragedy struck at La Palma Resort in Cortazar, Mexico, when gunmen raided the area, leaving seven dead and one seriously injured. Included in the victims was a 7-year-old child, sending shockwaves through the resort and beyond.

The attackers had no hesitation in firing shots, resulting in seven deaths, before taking the security cameras to escape justice.

Surveying what had been a scene of relaxation only moments before, residents on vacation were left traumatized. It was reported that those killed included 3 men and 3 women, and a child.

The authorities have yet to unveil who is behind this violent attack, and the proposed motive is unknown; nonetheless, it is speculated that drug cartels in Cortazar, who have been known to engage in skirmishes in the past, are involved.

The motive may not be known immediately, but one thing is clear – the attackers showed no mercy in taking the lives of seven innocent people, including a child.

The La Palma Resort was left in chaos and fear as the attackers poisoned the atmosphere with terror. The attackers destroyed the resort’s spa store before stealing the security cameras and the monitor and running away.

This heinous attack is a grim reminder that Mexico continues to suffer from violent outbreaks throughout the country. The peace of mind of those in Cortazar has been destroyed, and it is incumbent upon the authorities to have justice served to the perpetrators to bring a sense of order back to the community.

Saturday night tragedy struck Dadeville, Alabama, when a shooting tragically interrupted a Sweet 16 birthday party at the Mahogany Masterpiece, a small dance studio. Four lives were lost, and 28 others were injured, some critically, in the attack.

As a result, law enforcement launched an investigation into the incident at the request of the Dadeville Police Chief. The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) is appealing to the community for any pertinent information that could aid in the matter. Currently, police have not identified any suspects or motives as they continue the investigation.

Ivy Creek Healthcare, a hospital located in Dadeville, treated approximately 15 gunshot victims and reported that at least 17 ambulances were called to the scene. Some of the wounded were released, while additional individuals were flown to a trauma center in Birmingham.

The attack also claimed the life of Phil Dowdell, a star high school athlete and the grandchild of Annette Allen, the birthday celebrant’s grandparent, who was also injured and transported to the hospital.

In response to the incident, Rich Rodriguez, the head football coach for Jacksonville State University, took to Twitter to mourn the death of Phil in a statement.

Meanwhile, Dadeville is described as a small city with a population of roughly 3,000 and is located only a short drive from the Alabama State Capital in Montgomery.

The State Superintendent of Education, Eric Macky, underscored that “multiple communities and high schools” were significantly impacted by the tragedy. Furthermore, counselors will be available at local campuses to support students throughout the difficult process.

In light of the matter, the White House announced that President Biden was fully briefed while Governor Kay Ivey posted on Twitter and conveyed her grief about the events in Dadeville.

Yet, while emotion runs high and the suffering of the afflicted is palpable, ALEA is adamant that justice be served, and the community is encouraged to come forward and provide any assistance to the investigation.

Federal regulators bailed out Silicon Valley Bank after its historic collapse. But they offered no such rescue to the low-income communities to which the bank had pledged an $11 billion community benefits agreement.

Silicon Valley Bank in Santa Clara, California, days after the bank collapsed. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

When federal banking regulators bailed out Silicon Valley Bank’s wealthy depositors and gave its new owner a $17 billion discount, it turns out they offered no such rescue to another group impacted by the bank’s historic collapse: low-income communities to whom it had promised billions in lending.

Banking regulators told the Lever this week that “these pledges ended with the failure of the bank,” evaporating an expected source of affordable mortgage and small-business loans in California. The move could leave thousands of planned Bay Area affordable housing units in jeopardy at a time when a quarter of area residents are struggling to afford basic necessities and halt a $10 million program to increase homeownership in communities of color.

Those pledges were made as part of an $11 billion community benefits agreement signed by Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) ahead of a major merger in 2021. Progressive lawmakers and financial reform groups had urged regulators to preserve the agreement as a condition of SVB’s sale to First Citizens Bank & Trust Company, but no such terms were included in the deal they ultimately struck.

“Federal regulators missed an opportunity to show the American public that they work in their best interest, and not in the interests of banks,” said Paulina Gonzalez-Brito, executive director of the California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC), which collected twenty-two thousand signatures on a petition calling on regulators to enforce the agreement, one of the most comprehensive negotiated to date with a major bank.

Advocates push for fair lending commitments from banks seeking to merge because regulators rarely do. While new megabanks can mean less equitable lending and more consumer fees, federal agencies typically rubber-stamp the deals — as they did with SVB’s $900 million acquisition of a Boston-based bank in 2021, writing that the deal posed no serious risks.

The recent string of bank failures has already triggered calls to reverse Trump-era deregulation of large banks. But advocates like Gonzalez-Brito say it should also prompt a freeze on the mergers allowing those banks to grow so large in the first place, absent new rules to mandate such deals provide tangible benefits for the public.

First Citizens, the bank that purchased SVB at a deep discount in March, is a case in point. The Raleigh, North Carolina–based bank has grown more than tenfold since the 2008 financial crisis through its acquisitions, scooping up a slew of failed rivals and winning approval — or waivers — from regulators for a series of major mergers.

In 2021, when First Citizens’ plan to purchase the financial services company CIT Group — itself the product of a highly controversial 2015 merger — was in the public eye, the bank agreed to a community benefits plan. But First Citizens has to date been silent on whether it will fulfill the pledges made by SVB.

“We remain concerned about the full adoption of the community benefits agreement and are ready to fight for it if needed,” said Gonzalez-Brito. CRC will meet with First Citizens next week to ask them to honor the agreement.

Mergers Get Rubber-Stamped

When banks want to merge, regulators are supposed to consider several factors, including whether the deals entail any benefit to the public and whether they pose risk to the stability of the financial system.

But in practice, regulators typically perform only a “perfunctory” public interest analysis before rubber-stamping the deals. From 2006 to 2017, the Federal Reserve did not reject a single one of the nearly four thousand merger applications it received.

Banking consolidation often reduces the availability and increases the cost of credit and financial services for consumers.

In the absence of stronger oversight, and with a new wave of mergers underway, financial reform advocates have increasingly sought to extract voluntary commitments from banks to provide affordable loans and services to low-income communities.

Take SVB’s $900 million acquisition of a Boston bank in 2021.

The Federal Reserve approved the deal without fanfare, asserting that “customers of both banks would benefit.” To try to ensure that those benefits actually accrued outside of SVB’s tech and venture-capital bubble, community groups negotiated an agreement that included pledges of $4 billion in small-business lending, $1 billion in residential mortgage loans, and $10 million in down payment and other assistance for low-to-moderate income homebuyers.

But SVB’s collapse and the dissolution of that agreement is a prime example of why voluntary commitments are no substitute for robust regulation, said CRC’s Gonzalez-Brito — and why regulators should stop the practice of rubber-stamping mergers.

“Often we hear the rationale from regulators that a merged bank is a stronger bank,” Gonzalez-Brito said. “Silicon Valley Bank really calls that into question.”

President Joe Biden’s administration has signaled it may revisit the rules for reviewing bank mergers. Last year, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), one of the agencies involved in approving the deals, solicited comments on whether the approval framework should be updated to account for the risks of increasing consolidation in the banking sector.

Bank lobbying groups submitted comments opposing any far-reaching changes, as did an investment bank that regularly advises on such mergers and was recently hired by the FDIC to auction off SVB. No proposed rules have been issued to date.

A Bailout for Some

When Silicon Valley Bank failed in March, the FDIC promptly stepped in to rescue its customers — just ten of whom held more than $13 billion in largely uninsured deposits. (The FDIC only insures the first $250,000 of a customer’s deposits.)

Soon after, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) wrote a letter urging the agency to oversee continued implementation of the community benefits agreement, noting that the temporary bridge bank set up by the agency was “assuming and fulfilling SVB’s other contractual obligations.”

“Failing to require any new buyer of the bank to continue implementation of SVB’s community benefits plan would mean a loss of at least $2 billion in loans and investments to support affordable housing in California communities,” Waters wrote.

At least eleven Bay Area affordable housing projects were dependent on loans from SVB, according to local outlet KQED. The bank’s collapse brought construction screeching to a halt on a 112-unit building across from San Francisco’s City Hall that would have provided affordable housing for people with disabilities.

The impact extends beyond California. As the result of its 2021 merger with Boston Private Bank & Trust, SVB was also involved in the financing of at least seven hundred affordable housing units currently under construction in the Boston-area, according to a letter sent to First Citizens last week by ten members of Massachusetts’s congressional delegation.

“In the middle of a worsening affordable housing crisis, it is critical that there is a continuation of these activities under new ownership to avoid the disruption of local affordable housing development pipelines and initiatives,” reads the letter, led by Democratic representatives Ayanna Pressley and Stephen Lynch.

First Citizens has said it is in discussion with Boston community leaders. The bank did not respond to the Lever’s questions about whether it would fulfill specific lending commitments.

Under the terms of its deal with the FDIC, First Citizens paid nothing up-front for SVB’s assets, deposits, and loans, and the FDIC will cover its losses on commercial loans in the portfolio for the next five years. While First Citizens is now among the top-twenty largest US financial institutions, it remains just below the $250 billion threshold that would trigger tougher regulation.

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.

Despite the silver lining of green energy initiatives, Canada’s most recent federal budget does little for the country’s working people. In this, it stays consistent with the Liberal Party’s determination to throw its working-class constituents overboard.

Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, speaks at a news conference with Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s deputy prime minister and finance minister, right, at a day care in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on March 29, 2023. (David Kawai / Bloomberg via Getty Images

On March 28, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland unveiled the 2023 federal budget, hailing it as a “historic opportunity.” The budget was widely anticipated to include major green energy incentives in response to President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). It delivered on this front, providing Can$20.9 billion over six years bundled in a series of tax credits for clean electricity, clean hydrogen, and clean technology manufacturing. However, the overall budget is a mixed bag, with its climate initiatives serving as a proxy for other half measures contained therein. On matters of importance for working people — such as housing and public sector wages — the budget appears to be a total failure.

Environmentalist organizations, for starters, were ambivalent about the climate plans outlined in the budget. Keith Stewart, energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada, said the group “welcomes the unprecedented federal investments in greening the grid, which will be critical as we phase out fossil fuels by replacing them with electricity from renewable energy sources.” However, he cautioned, the budget outlines continued plans to subsidize oil and gas companies, sending mixed messages. “No money in the world could convince oil companies to become good actors on climate change, so it would be far more effective to simply regulate their emissions and invest scarce public funds into accelerating investments in efficiency and electrification,” Stewart added.

Equiterre, the environmentalist NGO where Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault worked before he entered politics, criticized the budget’s dependence on unproven carbon and storage technology, which allows oil and gas companies to continue production unabated. Equiterre’s director of government relations Marc-André Viau said:

This budget is in line with the government’s environmental vision, which aims to achieve its environmental objectives through a combination of clean and less clean technologies. Some announced measures such as the decarbonization of electricity networks are promising, but some, such as the significant financing of carbon capture and storage, are causing perplexity.

Furthermore, the budget doesn’t contain any investments in public transit. The clean transportation program manager for Environmental Defence Canada, Nate Wallace, warned that a lack of funding in emissions-reducing public transit will lead to a “death spiral” of service cuts and fare increases that will “push people into their cars.” Wallace expressed hope that the government’s coming update on permanent transit funding, expected later this year, will address funding shortfalls, but noted that these investments are needed immediately. He did, however, applaud the federal government’s investment in zero-emission vehicle manufacturing as a “measured response” to the IRA.

Concessions to the New Democratic Party

Another major component of the budget is $13 billion for the expansion of a means-tested dental-care program for those who make less than $90,000, which was a key piece of the federal Liberals’ agreement with the left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP). The NDP committed to support the Liberal minority government until 2025 in exchange for certain concessions under the agreement.

In 2022, the federal government created a temporary dental benefit cash payment for children under twelve, in families under the income threshold, which will be replaced next year with a government insurance program. This year, eligibility will expand to people under eighteen, seniors, and people with disabilities who fall below the income threshold and lack private insurance. By 2025, everyone in households earning less than $90,000 will become eligible.

To address rising inflation, the budget includes a onetime “grocery rebate” on the federal Goods and Services Tax, which will provide families with two children up to $467, seniors $225, and single people $234 to help them pay for groceries. This year’s average monthly grocery bill, for a family of four, is expected to be $1,357. The NDP has inexplicably touted this meager spending — which Freeland described as “narrowly focused and fiscally responsible” — as a win for affordability.

Pharmacare, another important Liberal concession for the NDP’s support, remains absent from the budget. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh acknowledges that this won’t come to fruition before the expiration of their deal, but continues to prop up the Liberal government nonetheless. Evidently, Singh believes that there is merit in focusing on the affordability, climate, and dental-care half measures, in spite of the fact that the Liberals were likely to implement these items anyways. It is likely that the Liberals will outline a framework for implementing a pharmacare system — just in time for the next election. This will maintain the party’s perennial promise of pharmacare, a pledge they’ve been making for the past quarter century.

No Money for Housing

The Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness (CAEH) lambasted the budget for not including any measures to ease the housing affordability crisis. “It’s clear that the federal government does not see the scale and urgency of these crises, and have offered no solutions,” said CAEH president and CEO Tim Richter. “For thousands of Canadians who will not be able to pay their rent this week, they will find no relief or meaningful support in this budget. Too many others will be projected unnecessarily into the life-threatening experience of homelessness.”

The only housing commitment in the budget is a $4 billion investment in an Urban, Rural and Northern Indigenous Housing Strategy. While the measure is very much needed to address the disproportionate number of homeless indigenous people, it is insufficient. It’s also being delivered by the Canada Housing and Mortgage Company, rather than National Indigenous Collaborative Housing Inc. This decision calls to mind antecedent colonial impositions that have always been disguised as charity.

The lack of urgency on the housing file makes sense when you realize that 38 percent of parliamentarians own real estate, meaning that they stand to profit from housing scarcity, according to disclosure records compiled by Davide Mastracci at Passage. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland co-owns two rental properties on Aquinas Street in London, UK, with her husband, New York Times reporter Graham Bowley, from which they draw income. She also owns a residential property in Kyiv and farmland in her hometown of Peace River, Alberta.

Housing Minister Ahmed Hussen owns a rental property in Ottawa, from which he draws income. It’s entirely unsurprising that those who benefit from the housing affordability crisis fail to appreciate its urgency.

Labor Relations

Echoing Biden, Chapter Three of the Canadian budget states that in order for companies to take full advantage of green energy subsidies, they will have to guarantee “that wages paid are at the prevailing level.” However, as we saw with the IRA, the devil is in the details. In the first six months since the US legislation passed, most of its $50 billion in investments have gone to companies in states that suppress unionization with “right-to-work” laws, which allow individual workers to opt out of unionization. The Canadian budget promises that the government will introduce anti-scab legislation by the end of the year, but this leaves a large window for employers to hire scabs.

Buried in Chapter Six of the budget, however, is a 3 percent across-the-board cut to the public sector to be implemented over four years for $7 billion in savings, followed by $2.4 billion in cuts annually. Crown corporations, which are owned by the state, are instructed to make “comparable spending reductions” beginning next year. Fred O’Rordian, head of tax policy at Ernst & Young, a firm notoriously amenable to reducing the size of government, described these measures as a “pretty blunt instrument,” which fails to “distinguish between programs that are already running efficiently and effectively and those that aren’t, and it doesn’t identify programs that are no longer necessary.”

The government insists that these cuts cannot come at the expense of “direct benefits and service delivery to Canadians” [emphasis added], meaning they’re going to come at the expense of those who deliver the benefits and services, whether through job cuts or wage freezes. Either way, an increasingly overworked public service will be forced to do the same job with fewer resources. As Chris Aylward, the head of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), which represents federal public sector workers, puts it, “This budget screams austerity.”

More than one hundred thousand PSAC members have voted in favor of entering a legal strike position. If they do go on strike, there won’t yet be any legislation in place to prevent the government from hiring scabs. One might understand the sweeping public sector cuts outlined in the budget, in this context, as a warning to public sector employees that if they want to retain their jobs, they should limit their demands at the bargaining table.

All in all, the Liberals’ latest budget is in keeping with the party’s time-honored modus operandi: pay lip service to the needs of regular people and then pass legislation that keeps the boss class happy. The Liberals are nothing if not consistent.

Even a year ago, the idea that corporate price gouging played a major role in the inflation crisis was a crazy, left-wing talking point. Now it’s the claim of central bankers and mainstream economists.

People shop for groceries in a Manhattan store on October 26, 2022 in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

As winter gives way to spring, many changes are afoot: birds are chirping, flowers are blooming, and influential and powerful people are finally acknowledging that corporate profiteering is playing a role in inflation.

From the start, left-leaning economists, news outlets, and politicians have argued that corporate price gouging has spurred our current cost-of-living problems — that firms weren’t just passing on their own higher costs to consumers, but using the many headlines about inflation to mark up prices more than necessary and quietly make a tidy profit. This was largely dismissed by establishment voices as a left-wing excuse to bash corporations, even as corporate profits soared to record levels and executives explicitly told investors that this is exactly what they were doing.

But as is so often the case, what was once a supposedly fringe, kooky left-wing position is now being recognized as reality. Take last month’s testimony from Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. Asked by Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, if workers’ wages and benefits could keep growing steadily in a scenario where inflation was tamed and corporate profits fell, Powell replied that this was possible “in the shorter term.” It was a major admission: Powell’s anti-inflation strategy has been explicitly to “get wages down,” yet here he was saying that wages could keep growing if the country was to get out of its inflation woes — as long as the current sky-high corporate profits took a hit.

This comes after comments in January from then Fed vice chair Lael Brainard that “wages do not appear to be driving inflation in a 1970s-style wage-price spiral,” and that “retail markups in a number of sectors” are creating what might be called “a price-price spiral” instead. (Brainard is now the head of President Joe Biden’s National Economic Council). That month also saw the release of a Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City paper that concluded that “markup growth was a major contributor to inflation in 2021,” being responsible for as much as half of that year’s inflation rate.

This seems to be taking hold in Europe, too. Reuters reported that in February, twenty-six European Central Bank (ECB) officials gathered at a retreat in Finland to discuss the matter, with more than two dozen slides’ worth of data presented to the group showing that company profits were growing bigger and bigger and were also outpacing wage growth, partly thanks to firms’ ability to set prices. Since then, a host of European policy makers have made similar points publicly, including ECB president Christine Lagarde and Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey.

At a March speech in Frankfurt, ECB executive board member Fabio Panetta warned that “opportunistic behaviour by firms could also delay the fall in core inflation,” and that “some producers have been exploiting the uncertainty” created by inflation to pump up their profit margins. “We should monitor the risk that a profit-price spiral could make core inflation stickier,” he urged.

Later that month, ECB economists noted the unusual fact that business profits were still going up despite a cyclical economic slowdown, arguing that the cost rises companies were facing in making their products “also made it easier for firms to increase their profit margins, because they make it harder to tell whether higher prices are caused by higher costs or higher margins.” They concluded that “the effect of profits on domestic price pressures has been exceptional from a historical perspective.”

This seems to be recognized across the continent. The central bankers of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have recently made the same points as these ECB officials, cautioning that “price hikes exceeded cost rises in several sectors” and had contributed to inflation, and promising to watch for a “profit-inflationary spiral.”

Even economists at profit-driven investment banks are sounding the alarm. “Today’s price inflation is more a product of profits than wages,” UBS Global Wealth Management chief economist Paul Donovan wrote in November, charging that firms had “taken advantage of circumstances to expand profit margins.”

More recently, in April, Albert Edwards, global strategist at Société Générale, France’s third largest bank, expressed disbelief at the “unprecedented” and “astonishing” ways that big business had used the inflation-driving disruptions of the past few years as an “excuse” to run up “super-normal profit margins.” Calling for price controls, he warned that this behavior, coupled with the way ordinary workers are being made to foot the bill for these excesses, could “inflame social unrest” and lead to “the end of capitalism.”

Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have put forward bills to hold down firms’ price hikes and claw back their resulting profits. But because discussing the role of corporate price gouging in the inflation crisis has been rendered virtually taboo the past few years, and because the Fed’s limited tool set only lets it attack workers’ wages instead of firms’ profits, these ideas haven’t gotten much traction. Instead, the US central bank is persisting with a strategy that its own staff are predicting will tip the country into recession.

If and when that happens, we’ll no doubt see an uptick in the popular anger Edwards warns about, especially if that downturn is met with more bailouts for the rich while workers are once more told to grit their teeth and make do with scraps. The jury’s out on whether the second part of Edwards’s prediction will come true — but the Federal Reserve sure seems dead set on finding out.

Once upon a time, “the shot heard around the world” referred to the beginning of the American Revolution or the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that sparked World War I. Now, in the postmodern fantasies of Ron DeSantis, “the Florida equivalent of the shot heard round the world” refers to his equally great war against […]

On Friday, France’s Constitutional Council upheld Emmanuel Macron’s deeply unpopular pension reform. The move shows the bankruptcy of a constitution that puts only minimal checks on the president’s power.

Protestors demonstrate against the decision by the French Constitutional Council to approve President Emmanuel Macron’s contentious pension reform law outside Hotel de Ville on April 14, 2023 in Paris, France. (Kiran Ridley / Getty Images)

On Friday, France’s Constitutional Council decided to uphold the core of President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular pension reform — giving the green light to a law that will raise the country’s retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four. This was the most likely outcome from the April 14 ruling, with the arbiters of France’s fundamental law sticking to their conservative instincts to safeguard the government’s package. In a parallel decision, it rejected a demand for a referendum on the reform, although a separate request for a nationwide vote was submitted on Thursday and will be judged in the coming weeks.

Having pocketed this victory, Macron’s hope is that the council’s decision will tie the knot on his controversial reform by providing it with a desperately needed dose of institutional legitimacy. As Macron claimed last month, the ruling would cap off the law’s “democratic pathway,” an egregious euphemism for his government’s muscling of a reform package rejected by a clear majority of the French public, an alliance of the country’s unions, and opposition parties of the Left and Right.

Macron’s pension reform has become the law of the land without ever having faced a direct vote from elected representatives in the National Assembly, where the president’s coalition is short of an absolute majority. Besides failed no-confidence votes in the lower house on March 20, the closest thing that Macron’s government has to approval from legislators was a shotgun vote forced on the Senate earlier last month. This major overhaul of the country’s pension system was adopted in a fifty-day blitzkrieg thanks to the use of a special legislative track designed for budgeting bills.

Macron’s unscrupulous deployment of the full arsenal of executive prerogative has opposition parties claiming that he ran afoul of parliament, as French people pore over the more obscure elements of a constitution designed to favor the presidency. But according to the Constitutional Council, the rolling out of these tactics — on something as important to the country’s social compact as the retirement age — was still within the bounds of constitutional stipulations on respecting parliamentary deliberation.

The council ruled that while there was an “unusual character” to the powers deployed by Macron’s government, this ultimately “did not have the effect of rendering the legislative process contrary to the Constitution.”

Completed Democratic Process?

“The text has arrived at the end of its democratic process,” Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne tweeted shortly after the council’s decision. “Tonight, there are no victors or vanquished.”

For the opponents of the legislation, however, this ruling does little to paper over what they claim to be the law’s gaping democratic illegitimacy. “Tonight’s decision is going to reignite the movement in opposition to this reform,” newly elected CGT union leader Sophie Binet told reporters in front of Paris’s city hall, where thousands gathered Friday evening to protest the decision. Macron, meanwhile, has said that he now hopes to resume a shattered dialogue with worker representatives, but union leaders are not asking members to call off strikes and have refused to speak with the president before May 1 demonstrations. Early Saturday morning, Macron signed the legislation into law. It is set to enter into effect on September 1.

“I hope that in the coming days we’ll keep seeing a permanent popular agitation,’” Danièle Obono, a France Insoumise MP from Paris, told Jacobin. “We’re not going to turn the page until this reform has been pulled. They’ve won a pyrrhic victory. They’re going to pay for this for the rest of the term.”

Macron’s decision to steamroll parliamentary and public opposition was reckless in its own right, and risks worsening a certain democratic malaise. This is something that Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National hopes to exploit in the years ahead, however much the political limelight has been stolen from it in recent months by striking workers and street protests. What currency will warnings about the threat that Le Pen poses to French institutions still have, after a supposedly moderate president has so brazenly warped them to suit himself?

The deeper problem, as the council’s decision perhaps indicates, is that Macron had a pathway that made his coup de force possible — and he took it. “If we strictly look at the law, it’s not very easy to justify the claim that the process has been unconstitutional,” says Bastien François, a political scientist and constitutional scholar at the Sorbonne. “Politically, it’s more than clear that this was a dangerous move. Juridically speaking, it’s more complicated.”

“There were still a number of possible juridical motives to censure this law,” France Insoumise European MP Manon Aubry maintains. “The sincerity of parliamentary debate was not respected. . . . there was a series of technically constitutional powers used in an abusive way to pass a retirement reform through a track meant for social security budgeting.”

But even if we accept that the body of jurisprudence that could have been drawn on to censure the government’s handling of the retirement reform is weak, this is itself partly a symptom of the Constitutional Council’s restrictive interpretation of the constitution. In her timely 2023 work La Constitution maltraitée: Anatomie du Conseil constitutionnel, constitutional scholar Lauréline Fontaine calls this the “social disillusionment of the Constitutional Council” — with the guardians of the constitution disregarding the stipulations on the “social” nature of the Republic that Charles de Gaulle reluctantly admitted into the text when it was adopted in 1958. The “constitutional council has set aside the social provisions of the French constitution,” Fontaine told Jacobin.

Rubber Stamp

Friday’s decision is another reminder of the lack of real institutional checks on the executive in France’s Fifth Republic. While the Constitutional Council is officially charged with checking the constitutionality of laws, the body more often serves to validate the wishes of the government in power.

The council’s treatment of Macron’s retirement reform provides a textbook case of the body’s minimal understanding of constitutional oversight. Leaving the centerpiece of the package intact (the hike in the retirement age), the council rejected as unconstitutional two small items included in the legislation in response to critiques about the problem of late-career unemployment. These were the so-called senior index, which would have had certain employers reporting statistics about the amount of elderly employers on staff; and then the creation of special contracts with payroll tax exonerations designed to encourage companies to hire workers nearing the end of their career.

In fact, many speculate that the government included these measures precisely to give the Constitutional Council something to censure. Macronite ministers even publicly lamented that measures like the exonerations — included as a bid to curry favor with the center-right parts of the opposition — would undermine the broader mission of a law designed to make budget savings.

The council’s “wise ones of Rue de Montpensier,” as they are called in French political jargon, bring together nine figures nominated sequentially by the president of the Republic and the presidents of the National Assembly and Senate. Six of its current members have joined the bench since Macron took office, which means that they were selected either by the president himself, his party’s leader in the National Assembly, or the chief of the loyal, center-right opposition Senate.

Two of its members have been ministers under Macron, with Jacqueline Gourault leaving cabinet in March 2022 to join the council. Alain Juppé, former leader of a key faction of the center right who has joined the president’s coalition since 2017, was prime minister during a failed 1995 bid to reform the retirement system — a plan ultimately withdrawn in the face of popular pressure. Although the council’s current chief, Laurent Fabius, is said to be at personal loggerheads with Macron, he sat alongside Macron for two years of cabinet meetings during the presidency of François Hollande, when he and Macron were foreign affairs minister and economy minister, respectively.

“That makes two former prime ministers, two former ministers, two former MPs, and three others intimately connected with holding governing power,” says Fontaine. “It’s well known that you nominate people to the Constitutional Council who will ensure that the body acts as it has for decades, changing little to laws while from time to time handing down a symbolic rebuke of marginal measures.”

Beyond the ideological, professional, and personal proximity to Macron, the culture of the Constitutional Council such as it has developed means that this is a group extremely sensitive to and familiar with the wishes of a sitting government. “The council has been conceived as the mirror of the actors that surround it so as not to interrupt what they want to do,” says Fontaine. “[It] functions more as an annex to the government rather than as a real counterbalancing power grounded in the popular will.”

It could be objected that a constitutional court should not be porous to the vagaries of public opinion. But there are moments when the need to preserve a society’s governing institutions demands sensitivity to the wishes of that society. The president and his gaggle were confronted with this choice, too — and decided to pit technical authority against substantive democratic legitimacy.

Ultimately, there was no way that Friday’s decision would not be political. “[This decision] agitates a growing political crisis in this country,” says Aubry. “Having everything fall on these nine people can’t be a decent way to seal the country’s future. It’s not credible.”

Macron is running riot — helped by out-of-touch institutions that are leaving a weary society with few ways to hold his power in check.