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The President has said that every tool is on the table to protect American businesses and consumers from rising prices at the gas pump.  We will continue to coordinate with major oil-producing consumers and producers towards a collective investment to secure stability and global energy supplies. 

We’ve intentionally calibrated our sanctions measures to maximize pain on the Russian economy and minimize economic effects to the U.S. and our allies and partners.  U.S. sanctions are not designed to disrupt the flow of energy from Russia. We will carve out energy related payments on a time-bound basis to allow for orderly transition of these flows away from sanctioned institutions.

Advances the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII). The Budget supports more than $50 billion to support PGII, a values-driven, high-impact, and transparent infrastructure partnership to meet the enormous infrastructure needs of low- and middle-income countries and support the United States’ and our allies’ economic and national security interests. PGII leverages public and private finance to advance climate and energy security, health and health security, digital connectivity, gender equity and equality, and related transportation infrastructure—all while creating opportunities for American businesses globally.

One year after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and caused widespread suffering, the global economy is still enduring the consequences — crunched supplies of grain, fertilizer and energy along with more inflation and economic uncertainty in a world that was already contending with too much of both.

As dismal as the war’s impact has been, there’s one consolation: It could have been worse. Companies and countries in the developed world have proved surprisingly resilient, so far avoiding the worst-case scenario of painful recession.

US inflation is leaving those sky-high days behind: Consumer prices in May rose at the slowest annual pace since March 2021, according to data released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Consumer Price Index, a key inflation gauge that measures price changes for a basket of goods and services, increased 4% for the year ending in May.

The US economy has been graced with good news of late, according to Nobel economist Paul Krugman.

"US economic news has been increasingly encouraging: falling inflation, no sign of a recession," the economics professor at the City University of New York said in a Wednesday tweet.

Workers saw their buying power grow in May for the first time in two years, as inflation continues to fall from its pandemic-era peak. If the trend continues, it’d be welcome news for households, who could lean more on their paychecks instead of their savings or credit cards to support everyday spending, economists said. “Real” hourly earnings increased by 0.2%, on average, this May versus May 2022, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Real earnings represent an average worker’s annual wage growth after accounting for increased costs for household goods and services, as measured by the consumer price index, or CPI. A positive number means the average worker experienced an increase in their standard of living. A negative number means the opposite: that salaries can’t buy as much as they did a year ago. May’s figure was the first positive annual reading since March 2021, according to BLS data. Before the latest reading, workers had endured 25 consecutive months of eroding buying power, the longest stretch on record, said Aaron Terrazas, chief economist at Glassdoor, a career site. “This is clearly a function of inflation starting to come down,” Terrazas said. “Real wages turned positive, and that’s great,” he added. “But many [people] are just playing catch-up for what’s happened over the past two years.” ‘Unprecedented’ pay jumps during pandemic Wage growth started to spike in 2021 as workers enjoyed the benefits of a hot job market. Businesses’ demand for workers jumped to record highs as the U.S. economy reopened broadly after its Covid pandemic-induced lull. Employers raised wages at the fastest pace in decades to compete for a limited pool of talent. “Many companies did unprecedented pay increases during the pandemic,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. In some cases, workers’ pay growth was strong enough to outrun inflation’s impact — especially for those who quit their jobs for higher-paying gigs elsewhere. For the average person, however, inflation swamped those wage gains. Such households saw their bills for food, rent and filling up the gas tank rise faster than their paychecks. The CPI, an inflation barometer, peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 — the highest level in four decades — but has since declined to 4% on an annual basis. Meanwhile, wage growth has also declined but at a slower pace — translating to a net boost to Americans’ financial well-being in May relative to last year. “The trend reversal is good news for consumers, who have remarkably weathered the decline well and are now set to become even stronger,” Pollak said. Positive trajectory for household buying power Other economic measures further suggest household well-being has improved. For example, Americans’ “real” disposable personal income — both in the aggregate and per capita — has risen for 10 consecutive months since June 2022, according to the most recent U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data. These data sets are more inclusive than that of wage growth. They include interest income, rental income and dividends, for example, all of which have been strong, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. The trend is a “very encouraging” sign for consumers, who are less likely to need to supplement income with excess savings or with additional debt, Zandi said. Americans owed nearly $1 trillion in credit card debt by the end of March, a record high, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Interest rates on credit cards are also at historic levels, at more than 20%. Further, Moody’s estimates that excess savings amassed during the Covid-19 pandemic peaked in September 2021 at almost $2.5 trillion, roughly equal to 10% of U.S. economic output, Zandi said. By April, aggregate savings had fallen to $1.4 trillion, a “big drawdown,” he said. While the contours of future inflation and wage growth are unclear, a continuation of positive real earnings and income would be good news for households and the economy, experts said. “The key to avoiding [recession] is consumers continuing to spend at a consistent pace, and this is a reason to think that’s what we’re going to see here,” Zandi said of data on real income. “Consumers are the firewall between recession and a growing economy. “The firewall is holding firm,” he added.

While declines in inflation are still falling short of expectations, our economists point out that deceleration in inflation across a broad range of indicators is now a fact, not just a forecast, and prospects for further progress in the second half of 2023 also look promising. They forecast core PCE inflation to come down to 3.7% by December 2023, with sequential rates averaging 2.9% in the second half of the year.

They expect improving supply chains and declining used-car auction prices to bring down core goods inflation materially starting in June, following what is likely to be another used car price increase in the Consumer Price Index in May. Our economists also think the news on rent inflation remains encouraging, with signs that seasonally adjusted asking rents fell in May despite the rebound in house prices. And the rebalancing in the labor market should bring down core service inflation excluding shelter (although they expect progress to remain only gradual when it comes to shelter inflation).

WASHINGTON (AP) — Consumer prices in the United States cooled last month, rising just 0.1% from April to May and extending the past year’s steady easing of inflation. At the same time, some measures of underlying price pressures remained high.

Measured year over year, inflation slowed to just 4% in May — the lowest 12-month figure in over two years and well below April’s 4.9% annual rise. The pullback was driven by tumbling gas prices, a much smaller rise in grocery prices than in previous months and less expensive furniture, air fares and appliances.

Inflation isn’t just a domestic problem. Sure, year-on-year inflation hitting 7%, the highest rate in four decades, is threatening to derail Joe Biden’s presidency. As my Bloomberg colleague John Authers has written, the inflationary trend appears broad and durable.

Yet now as before, inflation is a geopolitical phenomenon, which is rooted partly in rising global tensions and could have deeply corrosive effects on the U.S.-led world order.

UBI is expensive. Very expensive. As an add on, without simultaneously trimming government programs, it would require a significant tax increase.

Following the Finnish study results, Kari Hamalainen, chief researcher at the VATT Institute for Economic Research, said implementing a universal basic income for all citizens “would be expensive. If we had a universal basic income, we’d have to incorporate taxation”, and based on these results, “it would be unsustainable.”

U.S. inflation slowed in May, supporting the case for Federal Reserve officials to pause their run of interest-rate hikes this week.

Both the consumer price index and the core CPI — which excludes food and energy — decelerated on an annual basis, highlighting inflation’s descent since peaking last year. At 4%, year-over-year inflation is now at its lowest level since March 2021, according to data out Tuesday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Since media and digital technologies are in any case dramatically transforming every sphere of life, the key challenge is how to theorize this great transformation and how to devise strategies to make productive use of the emergent technologies. Obviously, radical critiques of dehumanizing, exploitative, and oppressive uses of diverse technologies in the workplace, schooling, public sphere, and everyday life are more necessary than ever, but so are strategies that use emergent technologies to rebuild our cities, schools, economy, and society. I want to focus, therefore, in the remainder of this section on how diverse technologies can be used for increasing democratization and empowering individuals. In previous articles (Kellner 1995, 1996, 1998a), I have argued that new technologies are creating a new public sphere, a new realm of cyberdemocracy, and are thus challenging public intellectuals to gain technoliteracy and to make use of the new technologies for promoting progressive causes and social transformation—themes that I develop in later chapters of this book.

Given the extent to which capital and its logic of commodification have colonized ever more areas of everyday life in recent years, it is somewhat astonishing that cyberspace is by and large decommodified for large numbers of people—at least in the overdeveloped countries like the United States. In the U.S., government and educational institutions, and some businesses, provide free Internet access and in some cases free computers, or at least workplace access. With flat-rate monthly phone bills (which I know do not exist in much of the world), or connections to a business, University, or organization that provides free computer use, one can thus have access to a cornucopia of information and entertainment on the Internet for free, one of the few decommodified spaces in the ultracommodified world of technocapitalism.

The United States must compete with China and confront the Chinese government on a range of issues while simultaneously combating the rise of anti-Asian racism at home. These two missions are not at odds with each other, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would have you believe. In fact, they must go hand in hand. In Alaska last weekend, Chinese government leaders sought to stoke our country’s racial divisions, accusing the United States of having “slaughtered” African Americans, to deflect criticism over Beijing’s mass atrocities against its Uyghur Muslim population. Meanwhile, CCP propaganda outlets have been using the killing last week in the Atlanta area of eight innocent people (six of them Asian) to cast aspersions on those who are condemning the Chinese government’s atrocities. Beijing’s goal is to conflate and confuse two related but distinct issues: challenging the Chinese government and the need to fight racism in the United States. But their gambit amounts to presenting a false choice between doing one or the other. “It is part of a broader strategy that the Chinese Communist Party is enacting to undermine our democracy,” Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) told me in an interview. “So when you see them creating that false equivalency . . . it is their way to sow discord in our society, because they understand when we are not united, we are weaker in leading the world in confronting their bad behavior.” Murphy, a former Pentagon official who came to the United States as a child refugee from Vietnam, said that the use of racist language by former president Donald Trump and other GOP officials plays into the CCP’s hands. Yet at the same she emphasized that U.S. leaders have to be able to speak honestly and critically about the CCP’s negative behaviors, including its mishandling of the covid-19 pandemic. The rise of racism against Asian Americans not only hurts the United States’ ability to deal with China, but also it harms efforts to make common cause with our regional allies and partners such as Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. Those governments’ ability to join the United States in confronting China is hurt when members of their diaspora communities are mistreated in the United States. “We have to be able to make a very clear distinction that our adversary and competitor is the Chinese Communist Party, not the Chinese people, and certainly not the Asian Americans who live here and who have contributed so much to this country,” Murphy said. “When we attack Americans of Asian descent, we attack ourselves.” Some American commentators argue that the effort to confront the Chinese government’s behavior has fueled the staggering rise in hate and violence directed at Asians and Asian Americans in the United States. It’s certainly true that Trump’s racist rhetoric regarding the coronavirus fueled hate and conflated the two issues, tragically. And U.S. government efforts to confront CCP influence operations in our country have at times unfairly targeted people of Chinese origins. Such targeting of Asians and Asian Americans makes us weaker at home and abroad. We must learn from, not repeat, examples from history when U.S. foreign policy negatively affected American minorities, including the mass internment of U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II and the mistreatment of Arab and Muslim Americans after 9/11. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), the son of Indian immigrants, told me that the United States has to out-compete China without replicating the paradigms of the Cold War. But, he said, we must also stand up to the authoritarian and repressive model the Chinese government is putting forward without ceding our moral authority. “That has to be the balance, enhance America’s strategic interest but clearly reject provocative rhetoric that’s intended to play to a base,” he said. “There’s a way to frame our moral position as a liberal democracy . . . without coming off as demonizing an entire civilization in a way that hurts Chinese or Chinese Americans.” Khanna and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) have co-sponsored a bill, the Endless Frontier Act, to revamp the National Science Foundation to try to out-compete China through technological innovation. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Todd C. Young (R-Ind.) are cooperating on companion legislation in the Senate. These efforts will be a major test of whether bipartisan cooperation on the China challenge is possible. It’s not the drive to confront China that is fueling hate and racism against Asians in America. Political opportunists are abusing that effort by fueling bigotry to score political points. This makes a unified strategy to confront the Chinese government only more difficult to achieve. In fact, addressing racism at home is crucial to winning the competition with China in the long run. “We have to be aggressive in our policies and working with our allies to combat the violations the Chinese are making, but at the same time, we can hold the CCP accountable without scapegoating Asian Americans,” Murphy said. “And we have a responsibility to do that.”

The Atlanta-area spa shootings — in which a White gunman allegedly slaughtered eight people, including six Asian women — have propelled the subject of anti-Asian violence to the center of the national conversation. For first-generation Asian Americans such as myself, who never begrudged our collective invisibility so long as our personal security was assured, it is profoundly disorienting to see our identity thrust into prominence precisely at the moment that our sense of local safety has been shattered.

Although prejudice against Asian Americans has deep roots in the nation’s historical institutions of racial exclusion, the current explosion of hate crimes against people of Asian descent is a consequence of the pandemic’s heavy toll on American society and the presence of a fragmented and defenseless minority that is easy to scapegoat. Many have correctly pointed out that President Donald Trump’s bigoted language contributed to the surge in racial violence targeting Asians.

Indications exist that the Xi leadership may be less satisfied with the status quo than Chan claims given that current PRC actions push up against not only the United States and Taiwan. South Korea reported economic punishment from China as a result of the deployment of a missile defense system to guard against possible North Korean attacks and repeated dangerous behavior by Chinese fishing vessels.[8] Japan expressed concern over increased naval and aerial activity by PRC assets in and over contested areas.[9] Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam indicate growing PRC harassment of their fishing and other civilian vessels in the South China Sea, which is notable given that Indonesia and the PRC do not have overlapping territorial claims.[10] Then there are tensions along the Sino-Indian border that recently resulted in deadly clashes between Indian and Chinese troops.[11] Current PRC behavior is worrisome for regional actors in other ways as well. Australia reports economic pressure for not conforming to Beijing’s preferences on pushing for an open investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and complaining about PRC efforts to influence its internal politics.[12] Along with Canada, Australia saw citizens detained and charged for illegal activities under suspicious circumstances.[13] Singapore too faced Chinese state pressure over its insistence on adherence the rule of law over the arbitration over the South China Sea brought by the Philippines against the PRC.[14] That such issues do not receive more treatment by Chan is curious since they raise questions about PRC’s commitment to self-restraint and can potentially trigger the chain-ganging effects on U.S.-China ties that Chan warns readers about (21-22, 211-215). Such friction can potentially harden positions and raise the stakes over an issue such that prevailing becomes more tied to status and other concerns, driving more aggressive and even revisionist behavior.[15] Chan’s finding that misplaced worries about the PRC and its intentions stem in part from misunderstandings of perspectives on international politics that are informed by theories from “the West” rather than China deserves elaboration and debate. So-called “Western” international relations theories often have parallels in the Chinese tradition, broadly construed. Work analyzing Spring and Autumn, Warring States, Song, and Ming documents indicate that the strategic thought that is prominent in these periods closely resembles statecraft familiar to those in the contemporary “West.”[16] Texts as varied as the Han-era annals Records of the Grand Historian and the Ming-era fiction Romance of the Three Kingdoms will suggest the same.[17] Parallels between “Western” and “Chinese” approaches to politics are unsurprising. Several millennia of collective human experience, thought, and debate over statecraft, conflict, as well as governance are almost certainly bound to produce similarities in responses. Dividing the world into “Western” and “Chinese” views of the world ignores the fact the PRC has disagreements with ostensibly “non-Western” polities such as India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, each with their own distinct philosophical traditions.[18] Also, despite sharing cultural origins, people in the PRC and on Taiwan disagree fundamentally issues of political values and rights, not the relatively simple issues of who should rule China or what a Chinese state should entail geographically.[19] Moreover, the PRC’s ruling Chinese Communist Party draws at least some of its inspiration from European thinkers in the form of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Successive dynasties from historical China also proved themselves very adept at conquest—that is how regimes and empires get built.[20] Attributing tensions between the United States and PRC to culture suggests an overly monolithic view of the rich and varied philosophical and political traditions both major powers draw from, giving them less credit than is due.[21] To claim that contemporary international scholarship and U.S. policy are unable to adequately understand China because they are “Western” may oversimplify the nature and seriousness of problems dogging U.S.-China relations and their consequences for the world. Relegating difference to culture is not only Orientalizing, it can encourage a misplaced expectation that understanding can bring some sort of happy, mutually acceptable outcome. Perhaps Beijing and Washington understand each other well. They simply disagree fundamentally over values and interests in ways that make finding mutually acceptable accommodation increasingly difficult. This does not have to imply that either side is morally superior or normatively “better” than the other, just that understanding provides little promise for improving relations and avoiding confrontation. Better accounting for such possibilities invites fuller consideration of the roles that agency and contingency play in major power relations, two features that Chan clearly identifies as critical in the volume. Thucydides’s Trap? deserves much credit for grappling with important, pressing, and difficult questions about the drivers behind the downturn in U.S.-China relations and possible ways to address this slide. Yet, Chan’s outlook is more similar to Graham Allison’s than he initially lets on. Allison’s call for creative statecraft is possible only if the United States and China are not locked in a structural situation which neither can escape or beset by contingent circumstances that prevents Washington and Beijing from effectively exercising the agency Chan believes is central. Chan offers some insight when he points to divergences in perspectives between Washington and Beijing but may be overly limiting the ways he conceives of effects of culture and socialization. Likewise, the volume can go further in conceptualizing the various ways third parties such as regional actors and international organizations can affect U.S.-China ties, given that world politics is not just major powers going at each other—a fact both Chan and Allison recognize. Major power interactions simply do not occur in a vacuum. Such dynamics may reinforce competition as much as ameliorate them, but their effects await further clarification and explanation.

Among the most important elements in war, writes karl von Clausewitz, are the “moral elements.”32 From the United States’ point of view, this phrase does not seem at all ironic. Just as the bombings of Afghanistan and Iraq in the first few years of the twenty-first century were justified as benevolent acts to preserve the united States and the rest of the world against “the axis of evil,” “weapons of mass destruction,” and the like, so were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki considered pacific acts, acts that were meant to save lives and save civilization in a world threatened by German Nazism. (Though, by the time the bombs were dropped in Japan, Germany had already surrendered.) even today, some of the most educated, scientifically knowledgeable members of U.S. society continue to believe that the atomic bomb was the best way to terminate the hostilities.33 And, while the media in the united States are quick to join the media elsewhere in reporting the controversies over Japan’s refusal to apologize for its war crimes in Asia or over France’s belatedness in apologizing for the Vichy government’s persecution of the Jews, no U.S. head of state has ever visited Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or expressed regret for the nuclear holocaust.34 In this—its absolute conviction of its own moral superiority and legitimacy—lies perhaps the most deeply ingrained connection between the foundation myth of the United States as an exceptional nation and the dropping of the atomic bombs (as well as all the military and economic interventions the united States has made in nationalist struggles in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle east since the Second World War).35 even on occasions such as Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) and September 11, 2001, when the united States had to recognize that it was just part of the world (and hence could be attacked like any other country), its response was typically that of reasserting U.S. exceptionalism—This cannot happen to us! We are unique, we cannot be attacked!—by ferociously attacking others. In the decades since 1945, whether in dealing with the Soviet union, the People’s republic of China, north korea, vietnam, and countries in Central America, or during the gulf Wars, the united States has been conducting war on the basis of a certain kind of knowledge production, and producing knowledge on the basis of war. War and knowledge enable and foster each other primarily through the collective fantasizing of some foreign or alien body that poses danger to the “self” and the “eye” that is the nation. once the monstrosity of this foreign body is firmly established in the national consciousness, the decision makers of the u.S. government often talk and behave as though they had no choice but war. War, then, is acted out as a moral obligation to expel an imagined dangerous alienness from the united States’ self-concept as the global custodian of freedom and democracy. Put in a different way, the “moral element,” insofar as it produces knowledge about the “self” and “other”—and hence the “eye” and its “target”—as such, justifies war by its very dichotomizing logic. Conversely, the violence of war, once begun, fixes the other in its attributed monstrosity and affirms the idealized image of the self. In this regard, the pernicious stereotyping of the Japanese during the Second World War—not only by u.S. military personnel but also by social and behavioral scientists—was simply a flagrant example of an ongoing ideological mechanism that had accompanied Western treatments of non-Western “others” for centuries. In the hands of academics such as geoffrey gorer, writes Dower, the notion that was collectively and “objectively” formed about the Japanese was that they were “a clinically compulsive and probably collectively neurotic people, whose lives were governed by ritual and ‘situational ethics,’ wracked with insecurity, and swollen with deep, dark currents of repressed resentment and aggression.”37 As Dower points out, such stereotyping was by no means accidental or unprecedented: The Japanese, so “unique” in the rhetoric of World War Two, were actually saddled with racial stereotypes that europeans and Americans had applied to nonwhites for centuries: during the conquest of the new World, the slave trade, the Indian wars in the united States, the agitation against Chinese immigrants in America, the colonization of Asia and Africa, the U.S. conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century. These were stereotypes, moreover, which had been strongly reinforced by nineteenthcentury Western science. In the final analysis, in fact, these favored idioms denoting superiority and inferiority transcended race and represented formulaic expressions of Self and Other in general.38 The moralistic divide between “self” and “other” constitutes the production of knowledge during the U.S. occupation of Japan after the Second World War as well. As Monica Braw writes, in the years immediately after 1945, the risk that the united States would be regarded as barbaric and inhumane was carefully monitored, in the main by cutting off Japan from the rest of the world through the ban on travel, control of private mail, and censorship of research, mass media information, and other kinds of communication. The entire occupation policy was permeated by the view that “the united States was not to be accused; guilt was only for Japan”:39 As the occupation of Japan started, the atmosphere was military. Japan was a defeated enemy that must be subdued. The Japanese should be taught their place in the world: as a defeated nation, Japan had no status and was entitled to no respect. People should be made to realize that any catastrophe that had befallen them was of their own making. until they had repented, they were suspect. If they wanted to release information about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and nagasaki, it could only be for the wrong reasons, such as accusing the united States of inhumanity. Thus this information was suppressed.40 As in the scenario of aerial bombing, the elitist and aggressive panoramic “vision” in which the other is beheld means that the sufferings of the other matters much less than the transcendent aspirations of the self. And, despite being the products of a particular culture’s technological fanaticism, such transcendent aspirations are typically expressed in the form of selfless universalisms. As Sherry puts it, “The reality of Hiroshima and nagasaki seemed less important than the bomb’s effect on ‘[hu]mankind’s destiny,’ on ‘humanity’s choice,’ on ‘what is happening to men’s minds,’ and on hopes (now often extravagantly revived) to achieve world government.” On Japan’s side, as yoneyama writes, such a “global narrative of the universal history of humanity” has helped sustain “a national victimology and phantasm of innocence throughout most of the postwar years.” going one step further, she remarks: “The idea that Hiroshima’s disaster ought to be remembered from the transcendent and anonymous position of humanity . . . might best be described as ‘nuclear universalism.’ once the relations among war, racism, and knowledge production are underlined in these terms, it is no longer possible to assume, as some still do, that the recognizable features of modern war—its impersonality, coerciveness, and deliberate cruelty—are “divergences” from the “antipathy” to violence and to conflict that characterize the modern world.43 Instead, it would be incumbent on us to realize that the pursuit of war—with its use of violence—and the pursuit of peace—with its cultivation of knowledge—are the obverse and reverse of the same coin, the coin that I have been calling “the age of the world target.” rather than being irreconcilable opposites, war and peace are coexisting, collaborative functions in the continuum of a virtualized world. More crucially still, only the privileged nations of the world can afford to wage war and preach peace at one and the same time. As Sherry writes, “The united States had different resources with which to be fanatical: resources allowing it to take the lives of others more than its own, ones whose accompanying rhetoric of technique disguised the will to destroy.”44 From this it follows that, if indeed political and military acts of cruelty are not unique to the united States—a point which is easy enough to substantiate—what is nonetheless remarkable is the manner in which such acts are, in the united States, usually cloaked in the form of enlightenment and altruism, in the form of an aspiration simultaneously toward technological perfection and the pursuit of peace. In a country in which political leaders are held accountable for their decisions by an electorate, violence simply cannot—as it can in totalitarian countries—exist in the raw. even the most violent acts must be adorned with a benign, rational story. It is in the light of such interlocking relations among war, racism, and knowledge production that I would make the following comments about area studies, the academic establishment that crystallizes the connection between the epistemic targeting of the world and the ‘‘humane’’ practices of peacetime learning. From Atomic Bombs to Area Studies As its name suggests, area studies as a mode of knowledge production is, strictly speaking, military in its origins. Even though the study of the history, languages, and literatures of, for instance, ‘‘Far Eastern’’ cultures existed well before the Second World War (in what Edward W. Said would term the old Orientalist tradition predicated on philology), the systematization of such study under the rubric of special geopolitical areas was largely a postwar and U.S. phenomenon. In H. D. Harootunian’s words, ‘‘The systematic formation of area studies, principally in major universities, was . . . a massive attempt to relocate the enemy in the new configuration of the Cold War.’ As Bruce Cumings puts it: It is now fair to say, based on the declassified evidence, that the American state and especially the intelligence elements in it shaped the entire field of postwar area studies, with the clearest and most direct impact on those regions of the world where communism was strongest: Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and East Asia.’ In the decades after 1945, when the United States competed with the Soviet Union for the power to rule and/or destroy the world, these regions were the ones that required continued, specialized super-vision; to this list we may also add Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. As areas to be studied, these regions took on the significance of target fields— fields of information retrieval and dissemination that were necessary for the perpetuation of the United States’ political and ideological hegemony. In the final part of his classic Orientalism, Said describes area studies as a continuation of the old European Orientalism with a different pedagogical emphasis: No longer does an Orientalist try first to master the esoteric languages of the Orient; he begins instead as a trained social scientist and ‘applies’ his science to the Orient, or anywhere else. This is the specifically American contribution to the history of Orientalism, and it can be dated roughly from the period immediately following World War II, when the United States found itself in the position recently vacated by Britain and France. Whereas Said draws his examples mainly from Islamic and Middle Eastern area studies, Cumings provides this portrait of the East Asian target field: The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) was the first ‘‘area’’ organization in the U.S., founded in 1943 as the Far Eastern Association and reorganized as the AAS in 1956. Before 1945 there had been little attention to and not much funding for such things; but now the idea was to bring coe ntemporary social science theory to bear on the non-Western world, rather than continue to pursue the classic themes of Oriental studies, often examined through philology. . . . In return for their severance, the Orientalists would get vastly enhanced academic resources (positions, libraries, language studies)—and soon, a certain degree of separation which came from the social scientists inhabiting institutes of East Asian studies, whereas the Orientalists occupied departments of East Asian languages and cultures. This implicit Faustian bargain sealed the postwar academic deal. A largely administrative enterprise, closely tied to policy, the new American Orientalism took over from the old Orientalism attitudes of cultural hostility, among which is, as Said writes, the dogma that ‘the Orient is at bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).’Often under the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and documentation, the ‘‘scientific’’ and ‘‘objective’’ production of knowledge during peacetime about the various special ‘‘areas’’ became the institutional practice that substantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as target. In other words, despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuits of higher learning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training, historiography, anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are fully inscribed in the politics and ideology of war. To that extent, the disciplining, research, and development of so-called academic information are part and parcel of a strategic logic. And yet, if the production of knowledge (with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific and military premises as war— if, for instance, the ability to translate a diffcult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military codes —is it a surprise that it is doomed to fail in its avowed attempts to ‘‘know’’ the other cultures? Can ‘‘knowledge’’ that is derived from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to the violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare’s accomplice, destined to destroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus? As long as knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of targeting or getting the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of the sovereign ‘‘self ’’/‘‘eye’’—the ‘‘I’’—that is the United States, the other will have no choice but remain just that— a target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the bomber. As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States, and as long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at the present, such study will ultimately confirm once again the self-referential function of virtual worlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed as the military and information target fields. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber— such as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter— will never receive the attention that is due to them. ‘‘Knowledge,’’ however conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will lead only to further silence and to the silencing of diverse experiences. This is one reason why, as Harootunian remarks, area studies has been, since its inception, haunted by ‘‘the absence of a definable object’’—and by ‘‘the problem of the vanishing object.’’

In spite of the ostensible successes of Cold War civil rights and emergent articulations of racial liberalism, because racial violence is the condition of possibility for racial capitalism, it is not surprising that each encounter with what appears to be a new moment of human obsolescence enacted through automation becomes easily associated with white loss. Layoffs in the US auto industry, perceived by the public as a response to the dominance of Japanese automobile manufacturing, led to a series of attacks on Asian Americans. This includes the infamous 1982 beating of Vincent Chin in Detroit by two laid-off Chrysler workers, which resulted in Chin’s death. Though it was presented by the defendants in court as a bar brawl gone bad, eyewitnesses reported that the killers justified their attack by saying, “It’s because of you we’re out of work,” linking the Asian American Chin to Japanese autoworkers.45

The conflation of productivity and robotic function with Asian-ness was not new to the 1980s. As Wendy Chun has argued, “the human is constantly created through the jettisoning of the Asian/Asian American other as robotic, as machinelike and not quite human, as not quite lived.”46 Yet the 1980s did signal a shift in Asia’s position within the global economy and the refiguration of the human–machine boundary in the late years of the Cold War and the early decades of the postindustrial era. According to David Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu, “the yellow peril anxiety of an earlier, industrial-age era embodied by Fu Manchu found new forms across cultures and hemispheres as Asian economies became more visible competitors.”47 They propose techno-Orientalism as a concept through which to apprehend the ways in which racial, technological, and geopolitical imaginaries are linked in order to secure US dominance.

The Contemporary Racial Repertoire of the “China/Chinese” Threat

The outbreak of the pandemic could not have had worse timing (as if it could be timed), but timing is critically important here. Its emergence amid the ongoing intensive trade war between the United States and China is significant in that the prevailing tensions between the two countries and the discourses of Chinese unfair trade competition, scientific espionage, and technological surveillance frame the reception of the pandemic. One may argue that President Trump’s insistence on blaming China for the spread of the deadly virus is yet another tactic in his administration’s sustained attempt to quell China’s economic power at the same time that it provides a foil to distract from—and a scapegoat to blame for—the economic and public health crisis in which we find ourselves. At this particular juncture, we unfortunately have been inundated with media coverage of a plethora of accusations and actions launched against China and Chinese Americans. Within the past two years, we have witnessed the implementation of trade sanctions and tariffs against China, the removal of prominent Chinese American scientists from research institutions, and the severing of nationwide economic transactions with certain China-based telecommunications corporations, with Huawei Technologies Company being the most notable. All these have been advanced in the name of national security. The discursive formation and the representational devices that have been used to justify these state directives play a critical role in constructing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as culprit and as America’s enemy number one. These constructions, some of which will be examined in this essay, are layered upon one another, each building and elaborating on the last, and each invoking and simultaneously inciting a different set of anxieties that lie within the broader repertoire of China/ Chinese as threat. Indeed, the inundation of media about China makes it difficult, if not impossible, to decipher truth from falsehood, myth from reality, rhetoric from evidence. Our task here is not to weigh the truth-value of these representations but to treat them as ongoing contests embedded in power and to draw out their material effects. It is worth noting that while the explicit target of U.S. state aggression has been the mainland Chinese state or the PRC, the actual effects are much more wide-ranging and extend into everyday aggressions against all those who present as East Asian American. In our examination of the variegated representations of China/Chinese, we suggest that the longstanding ideology of “yellow peril” remains not just pertinent, but extremely forceful in constructing a multifaceted repertoire of Chinese state threat and, by extension, of Chinese/Asian American threat. What is particular about this recent iteration of yellow peril is its configuration through the lens of techno-Orientalism, a framework that is primarily used to examine the explicitly fictional genres of novels, videogames, and films but that we now assert as being actively deployed in this current historical conjuncture.

Symone Baptiste: Thank you, Bill. This brings me to my next question: the idea of a universal demand, and the argument that we shouldn’t be fighting for something unless it’s a “universal” demand because it’s too divisive. What do you have to say to that argument? Is it worth a fight if you might not be part of the oppressed group that you’re fighting for? Is there still relevancy to that demand even if it is not a universal demand and how can someone who is not a part of that oppressed group see themselves in the fight and see it as still a benefit to them to fight for something like reparations or restitution?

Dina Gilio-Whitaker: However we talk about justice in a settler state like the United States, everything is still happening on Indigenous lands. We cannot lose sight of that, whatever we talk about, whether it’s Black reparations, whether it’s justice for different kinds of colonized peoples, it still occurs within the context of the state. And all of that is within the history of lands, most of which the state stole from Indigenous peoples who still maintain claims to those lands.

ATOP THE dome of the U.S. Capitol building, above the two chambers where members of Congress meet to decide the country's laws, sits the bronze Statue of Freedom. This idol to freedom and liberty was cast in the early 1860s at a bronze foundry outside Washington. When the foundry foreman went on strike, the owner broke the strike with the unpaid labor of a slave named Phillip Reid.¶ This historical anecdote is an apt symbol for U.S. society: At the crown of American capital, with its foundations built by slaves, sits a Freedom constructed by unfree labor, whose bondage is a condition for perpetuating further class divisions.¶ The foundation of American liberty and progress came from the kidnapping and enslavement of African peoples. Since the days of chattel slavery, the sordid history of slavery and racism has been, in the words of O'Shea Jackson, "doing us wrong since the first day."¶ The crimes of slavery and racism are not only still unaccounted for--they are still being perpetuated as Black people are murdered, imprisoned, disenfranchised, exploited and oppressed in a racist system.¶ How to right these historic and present-day wrongs has been a question and a task of struggles throughout the years. One long-standing demand has been reparations paid to African Americans for the crimes of slavery and its enduring impact to this day.¶ The reparations demand was reintroduced to public discussion by Ta-Nehisi Coates, beginning with a 2014 essay in the Atlantic titled "The Case for Reparations."¶ More recently, the topic became the focus of a debate between Coates and scholar Cedric Johnson in the context of the 2016 presidential elections. Growing out of a criticism by Coates of Bernie Sanders' campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, the debate is an important one. It gets at both the issue of reparations and what it would take to make restitution for America's racist history, as well as different understandings of the relationship of racism and class.¶ In the spirit of debate among fighters for Black freedom and a better world, we offer this contribution. While we sympathize with much of what Johnson argues in his response to Coates, we think that his approach slides toward a reductive approach to the dynamics of class and racism. At the same time, we differ from Coates, who sometimes juxtaposes race and class.¶ We believe a Marxist approach is called for--one that sees racism and class exploitation as distinct, though inextricably bound in the manner that Karl Marx suggested when he wrote that the "veiled slavery" of class exploitation "needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal."¶ A Marxist approach neither reduces anti-racist demands to a broad, social democratic program, as Johnson does, nor does it ignore the importance of a class-based approach to a politics of solidarity, as Coates does.¶ The battle against class exploitation must also be a struggle against anti-Black racism and vice versa. This is the basis on which we would make a socialist case for reparations.¶ COATES' INITIAL criticism of Sanders was sparked by the candidate's response when he was asked in Iowa if he supported reparations for slavery:¶ No, I don't think so. First of all, its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil. Second of all, I think it would be very divisive. The real issue is when we look at the poverty rate among the African American community, when we look at the high unemployment rate within the African American community, we have a lot of work to do.¶ Coates, who later said that he would be voting for Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, confronted Sanders over the fact that his radicalism rails against the "billionaire class," but retreats to a more moderate position regarding anti-racist demands.¶ Unfortunately, Coates attributed this correct critique of Sanders' attitude toward reparations to the socialist movement generally, which he thinks assumes that socialism is implicitly and necessarily anti-racist:¶ This is the "class first" approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible. But raising the minimum wage doesn't really address the fact that Black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between Black and white graduates.¶ Coates is right that economic measures to lift up the working class will not, in and of themselves, overcome racism. But we should start from the recognition that because Black people are disproportionately represented among the ranks of the working class and the poor, such measures would be an enormous boost to Black America.¶ This is why a 2010 NAACP resolution calling for reparations put forward a program reminiscent of Sanders' own, supporting "investments in environmental, educational, health, business and training programs to attempt to allow Blacks and the poor to recover from hundreds of years of exploitation including slavery, post-slavery and colonial style extractive economic exploitation."¶ By contrast, Coates' vision of reparations in his 2014 Atlantic article is not very specific. He mainly argues that the next step would be passing Rep. John Conyers' H.R. 40 legislation to form a committee to study the effects of slavery--hardly a comprehensive radical plan for restitution for such a world-historic wrong.¶ COATES ENVISIONS "an unsegregated America [that] might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color." This reflects the limit of his position for reasons that Cedric Johnson articulates well.¶ We agree with Johnson's call for a "universal, broad-based leftist project," which he advances in his response to Coates. We also believe in a socialist struggle whose aim is ending all oppression. But we disagree with Johnson on the way to go about it.¶ His argument for working class-oriented, social democratic measures over reparations as a means to address Black poverty is distilled in his argument that:¶ the reparations demand has never yielded one tangible improvement in the lives of the majority of African Americans. Though limited and historically uneven, the kinds of social-democratic reforms that are now being advanced by the Sanders campaign have had a discernible effect on the lives of the majority of African Americans at various points.¶ Johnson's references to the New Deal--the set of programs he points to most of all for its impact on Black life--leave out the history of class struggle that is responsible for winning it.¶ Tenants' organizing in Harlem in the 1930s; the victorious general strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo, and San Francisco; the 1936-67 Flint sit-down strike against General Motors and the wave of sit-downs it inspired--none of these make it into Johnson's history of the New Deal. Instead, he accepts the default historical understanding of the history of the Great Depression--which is also the centerpiece of Democratic Party mythology about being "the party of the people"--that Franklin Roosevelt deserves the credit for the New Deal. By not discussing this explicitly, Johnson obscures the question of where the reforms that would uplift the working class--and Black workers in particular--come from.¶ Another key takeaway from Johnson's critique of Coates is his claim that "more than any other contest in recent memory, the 2016 Democratic presidential primary has provided us with a clear set of alternatives" to neoliberalism. That may be true as far as elections are concerned, but a wider view would recognize the importance of other social struggles beyond the ballot box.¶ Indeed, the movement proclaiming that Black lives matter--which has opened up the circumstances for Coates and Johnson to debate the way forward to end racism--only gets one mention in Johnson's piece. Worse, that mention comes when Johnson chides activists from the Black Lives Matter movement for disrupting Sanders at a rally in Seattle.¶ WE TAKE issue not only with Johnson's formulations about the fight for reforms, but also his characterization of the issue of reparations. Johnson argues that reparations are a "means for advancing discrete, bourgeois class interests."¶ But it's simply not the case that any member of the capitalist class at the moment--Black or white--is calling for reparations for Black people!¶ We do take seriously the concern that a movement for reparations could be hijacked and redirected by a minority of the Black community with the most power today--that administration of a reparations program would be carried out by the "Black bourgeois and the professional-managerial political elite."¶ This is a real concern, albeit one that exists in the battle for any reform, since all involve a political struggle with reformists seeking to contain and limit the reform in their own interest.¶ But it is fatalistic to argue that a movement for reparations would inevitably fall under the leadership of the Black bourgeoisie, rather than a more radical and/or working class-based force. Our role shouldn't be to shun the challenges involved in any reform struggle, but engage in a political fight to take the movements as far as they can go, and then point the way even further.¶ In dismissing reparations, Johnson also rejects a focus on the particular oppression of Black people in regards to inequality in the U.S. today. Johnson accuses Coates of continuing "to reach for old modes of analysis in the face of a changed world, one where Blackness is still derogated but anti-Black racism is not the principal determinant of material conditions and economic mobility for many African Americans."¶ Here, we side with Coates and Michelle Alexander--who Johnson also takes issue with--in calling attention to racist incarceration, job and housing discrimination, and other aspects of Black oppression that cannot be attributed solely to the working-class background of the majority of Black people.¶ While we agree that class is the principal determinant of the material conditions that affect Black people, we cannot limit our understanding of racism to class exploitation.¶ If we did, then how would we make sense of the fact that, as Coates points out, white people with criminal records get employment easier than Black people without them? How do we respond to the fact that in 2010, the median wealth of a single white woman was $42,600 versus $5 for a single Black woman?¶ A MARXIST analysis must include the fact that white workers and Black workers share more in common with each other than they do with the ruling class, while also understanding how the social experiences of Blacks in America, because it is marked by a brutal regime of racism, is markedly different than the experiences of whites.¶ These are not contradictory points, but ones that must be taken together to demonstrate how and why racism and class in America are interrelated. Unfortunately, too many of the contributions to the debate between Coates and socialists like Johnson and others are one-sided--as if you either talk about oppression specific to Black people and measures to ameliorate that oppression, or you talk about class solutions.¶ We make the case for a different attitude: that socialists must call particular attention to anti-Black racism and Black liberation as central to the class struggle.¶ Our method is influenced by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky's writings on Black Nationalism and his argument with U.S. socialists, who initially took a position very similar to Johnson, to take up the cause of Black self-determination. In one discussion, Trotsky noted:¶ The petty bourgeoisie will take up the demand for "social, political, and economic equality" and "self-determination" but prove absolutely incapable in struggle; the Negro proletariat will march over the petty bourgeois in the direction of the proletarian revolution.¶ Applied to the question of reparations, Trotsky's point was that some elements of the Black political and business elite might solidarize with and even champion the demand for reparations, but they will be "incapable of struggling" in a fashion that can attain it.¶ Indeed, it is hard to imagine how Black millionaires or the Congressional Black Caucus, with its corporate backers like Walmart, would be capable of carrying out a measure that, if done properly, would mean a massive expropriation of wealth from the corporations, banks and insurance companies that profited handsomely from the slave trade and its aftereffects.¶ We believe that socialists should march behind the banner of reparations, while arguing as participants in the struggle that the steps required to actually accomplish such a task as restitution for one of the worst crimes of the American state would be a social change with revolutionary potential.¶ If that seems exaggerated, remember that the moment in history when the demand for reparations was most advanced was when, in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, "with perplexed and laggard steps, the American government followed in the footsteps of the Black slave" and carried out one of the largest expropriations in modern times with the emancipation of the slaves at the end of the Civil War.¶ FOR JOHNSON, reparations isn't a political demand, but a symbolic, moral claim. But the history of the demand for reparations shows it has been anything but symbolic, and very political in all instances.¶ During the Civil War, the Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman issued his Special Field Order No. 15, which designated 400,000 acres of captured land in the South to be used for freed slaves to settle on. This was the origination of the famous "40 acres and a mule" that freed slaves expected, but were denied after the war.¶ The period of radical Reconstruction in the South represented a practical attempt to carry out a partial program of reparations. But the slaveocrat reaction, in the form of racist terrorism carried out by the Ku Klux Klan and the repressive Black Codes, rolled back any advances.¶ Reparations gained new attention with the rise of the Black Power movement in the 1960s and '70s. The Black Panther Party's "Ten-Point Program" called for settling the "overdue debt" of slavery and racism. Previously, Malcolm X had often spoke about being "here to collect" and the need for reparations. In 1969, former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader James Forman issued his Black Manifesto that was a more moderate articulation of the demand.¶ Since that time, the demand for reparations has persisted in many forms: Conyers' annual proposal of H.R 40; local examples like successful efforts to gain reparations for survivors of police torture in Chicago and victims of eugenics in North Carolina and Virginia; proposals at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, which led the U.S. delegation to walk out; an initiative by 15 Caribbean governments calling for reparations from European governments for the slave trade.¶ Conyers' resolution, an easy piece of window-dressing since it only calls for a study of the effects of slavery, aside, the demand has an enduring power. And far from being easily co-opted and used to divert antiracist struggle, it appears that even symbolic measures to acknowledge a debt incurred by the crime of slavery are greeted with reluctance by the U.S. ruling class, including its small number of Black members.¶ Another criticism made by Johnson is that reparations are a "political nonstarter." In other words, he sides with Sanders' statement that any chance of passing reparations in today's Congress is nil.¶ That may be true, but we need to insist on a broader political horizon. Any demand is a political nonstarter if you accept the boundaries of what is "realistic" within mainstream politics. Before the people of Ferguson and Baltimore fought back, and protesters in every U.S. city took to the streets, one could say that the idea of reforming the police in any way was a political nonstarter. The point is that struggle changes the limit of what is possible.¶ Then there is Johnson's suggestion that Coates challenged Sanders on reparations to "give the Clinton camp another fresh talking point." This is another concession to "realism." Johnson believes that the Sanders campaign is the "best opportunity we have" to achieve significant changes, and therefore, the left must close ranks and soften its critiques, so as not to lay him open to being attacked from the right.¶ In this respect, Johnson and Coates, though they rightly critique the dominant neoliberalism of the Democratic Party, share a blindness to the institutional barriers in using the Democratic Party as a tool for fighting anti-Black racism. We agree with Michelle Alexander's statements in a recent Nation article:¶ I hold little hope that a political revolution will occur within the Democratic Party without a sustained outside movement forcing truly transformational change. I am inclined to believe that it would be easier to build a new party than to save the Democratic Party from itself.¶ UNFORTUNATELY, COATES and Johnson have agreed on the lines of debate where one either supports reparations for Black people or looks to an alternative, socialist solution. We reject the either/or choice and argue instead for the socialist case for reparations.¶ First and foremost, the redistribution of $1.4 trillion, to use one recent estimate, from corporations and a government built on the back of slavery into the hands of Black America would be transformative and long overdue.¶ But even before that, a discussion and a struggle centered on the redistribution of wealth stolen through exploitation and oppression can only be positive for the socialist cause and relevant well beyond Black Americans. After all, all corporate wealth is the product of exploited labor, be it enslaved or waged.¶ Lastly, and crucially, the call for reparations presents an opportunity to win the whole working class--with its varying colors, national origins and histories--to unity against racism. Unity will not be achieved by rallying around a flat conception of class, but only by recognizing that class struggle and winning freedom for all will require a struggle for Black liberation in particular.¶ To those who say that the vision of a U.S. working class united behind the banner of reparations for Black people is unrealistic, our answer is that we are less interested in what is realistic and more concerned with what is necessary. No matter how far we are from this vision, or how long it will take to get there, it is where we need to go.