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President Xi Jinping of China is poised to rule the country indefinitely after Chinese lawmakers passed changes to the country's constitution abolishing presidential term limits.

The amendment was sure to pass the country's rubber-stamp legislature, the National People's Congress, which voted 2,958 in favor, two opposed and three abstaining.

Since Xi assumed leadership of China's Communist Party in 2012, he has rapidly consolidated power to levels not seen since the era of Mao Zedong. The constitutional change officially allows him to remain in office after the end of his second term in 2023.

No surprises: constitutional amendment scrapping presidential term limits passes by overwhelming majority: 2958 in favor, two opposed, three abstentions. (Who are the "Fearless Five?") pic.twitter.com/vhRf8Fe9gF
- Anthony Kuhn (@akuhnNPRnews) March 11, 2018

"In some ways, the move represents the end of China's 40-year-long reform era," NPR's Anthony Kuhn explained last month, when the proposed changes were announced. "The era began after the death of Chairman Mao Zedong in 1976, when China tried to move away from the political violence and cult of personality that characterized his rule."

The two-consecutive-term limit to China's presidency was put in place by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1982 "in order to avoid the kind of chaos and tumult that can sometimes happen when you have a single authoritarian leader, as China had with Mao Zedong," Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations told NPR's All Things Considered.

The change in presidency aligns it with the other posts Xi holds, as head of the Communist Party and head of the military, neither of which have term limits, Kuhn says.

The National People's Congress approved two additional constitutional amendments, including "the addition of a political philosophy called Xi Jinping Thought to the constitution, and the creation of politically driven 'supervisory commissions' tasked with investigating party members and civil servants," The Guardian reported.

Xi signaled his strength last year when he had his theories added to the Communist Party charter and he bucked the trend to designate a successor at the end of his first term.

China's leaders "claim that they're making the move in response to popular demand, but they haven't released the results of any survey," Kuhn adds. "Criticism of the move has been largely censored on the Internet, so it's hard to gauge public opinion on the matter."

"In a sign of the issue's sensitivity, the government censors are aggressively scrubbing social media of expressions ranging from 'I disagree' to 'Xi Zedong,' " The Associated Press reports. "A number of prominent Chinese figures have publicly protested the move, despite the risk of official retaliation."

Though the AP adds, "To be sure, Xi's confident, populist leadership style and tough attitude toward official corruption has won him a significant degree of popular support."

China's state-run news agency Xinhua described the event simply, with the headline: "China's national legislature adopts constitutional amendment." The agency said the constitutional changes have "won approval from both inside and outside the Party, is of historic significance for ensuring prosperity and lasting security of both the Party and the country."

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China Removes Presidential Term Limits, Enabling Xi Jinping To Rule Indefinitely

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President Xi Jinping of China is poised to rule the country indefinitely after Chinese lawmakers passed changes to the country's constitution abolishing presidential term limits. The amendment was sure to pass the country's rubber-stamp legislature, the National People's Congress, which voted 2,958 in favor, two opposed and three abstaining.

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In June, a video of mob violence in northern India surfaced online. Filmed in a village near Ghaziabad, the video showed people slap and violently harass Abdul Samad Saifi, a 72-year-old man wearing traditionally Muslim clothing. The mob then cuts off his beard while he sobs. Shortly after it was posted, the video went viral and sparked widespread outrage.

Before long, several Twitter users who shared the video saw an error message indicating that their tweets had been "withheld in India in response to a legal demand."

The legal demand was one of thousands made to Twitter directly from the Indian government over the last four years. After Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rose to power in 2014, any online content that criticized him, the government, or Hinduism more broadly, was branded as "anti-national"-a term popularized by trolls and self-proclaimed jingoists to fuel a brash and bigoted kind of patriotism--and made vulnerable to removal.

In 2020, the Indian government asked Twitter to remove nearly 10,000 tweets, up from about 1,200 the prior year; in 2017, the government only demanded that Twitter delete 248 tweets.

"There has always been a coordinated strategy to paint everyone who disagrees with the government as an enemy of the nation," Pranav Dixit, a technology reporter for BuzzFeed News , says. "The only difference now is that Modi is far more social media-savvy than his predecessors." Cheap internet and big telecommunications infrastructure boomed in India right around the time he took office. "Modi knew that he could sway millions of people with a single tweet," Dixit says. "He has very deliberately and systematically built a right-wing online ecosystem that benefits his party."

The rapid advancement of technology amplified two competing dynamics: criticism against the state became much easier, and with it, the government's ability to control what its citizens said. And while content-removal demands by the Modi administration have come under increasing scrutiny in global media, little data exists to track the extent of censorship.

Using a combination of web scraping, APIs, and text extraction from hundreds of legal notices given to Twitter (sourced from the Lumen database, a Harvard University initiative monitoring global content removals), I created a series of datasets to better understand the nature and magnitude of the content that the Indian government wiped from Twitter. Because of a variety of factors-including the discretionary nature of Twitter's data disclosures, the Indian government's lack of transparency, and user-made changes to their respective flagged tweets-my data represents what is likely a fraction of the affected content. Still, these limitations provide a sense of how restrictive India's digital climate is, and provide a narrow glimpse into a much larger problem.

Data from Twitter's own transparency reports reveal that, in 2020, the Indian government asked Twitter to remove nearly 10,000 tweets, up from about 1,200 the prior year; in 2017, the government only demanded that Twitter delete 248 tweets.

The effects of the government's requests for removal were only felt locally--meaning the tweets were only "withheld" if the user chose India as their country setting. In other words, even if the user was physically in India, they could change their setting to a different location and view the removed tweet. After I changed my own settings to the United States, I was able to find what most of the tweets contained. (Click to enlarge the following images.)

Many of the flagged tweets--which were mostly opinions on the news, satirical jokes, or expressions of solidarity with activists in memoriam--fell broadly into a few categories, and coincided with significant political or otherwise controversial events. They included criticism around the revoking of Article 370, a law that granted Kashmir its autonomy for more than seven decades since India's independence from British rule; the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act, which discriminated against Indian Muslims and prevented Muslim immigrants from seeking asylum; and a series of agricultural bills that sparked the largest farmer protests in the world, amidst the poorly managed COVID-19 pandemic.

The "rules" under which a tweet may be considered inflammatory are now much broader than in prior years. In the takedown notices, several tweets are cited as "objectionable" or "seditious" if they contain dissent of any kind, without further explanation. Even criticism of sexual violence-when the perpetrators were Hindu-is branded as dissent. As more tweets and topics come into the line of fire, what "anti-national" means grows murkier.

Twitter plays a complicated role in India's political landscape. Since it's a private company operating in India, it is legally bound to comply with national regulations. Section 69A in the Indian Penal Code allows the government to block access to a media intermediary (including TV networks, social media platforms, and search engines) "in the interest of the sovereignty and integrity of India, its defense, security or the maintenance of public order." When the government makes a legal demand to Twitter-which it often does without explanation-Twitter outlines how it enforces actions against reported "grievances" in reports published monthly. The rate of compliance with the Indian government's legal demands is only around 10 percent-the ambiguously stated reason for which is that the flagged tweets may not violate Twitter's own terms of service. (Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on more details about this internal process.)

"If Twitter takes down a random piece of content-it's a private company, they can act according to their internal guidelines and don't have to explain anything publicly," Tanmay Singh, a lawyer working with the Internet Freedom Foundation. But when the government makes a demand to remove a citizen's free speech of any kind, it has to follow due process and disclose all relevant information publicly according to India's Code of Criminal Procedure, Singh says. The government has not made any of its court orders to Twitter publicly accessible. "What the government is doing with Twitter severely undermines transparency," Singh says. "Without transparency, you cannot have accountability. And we absolutely need both in a participatory democracy."

These Twitter content removals also target Indian journalists and activists. Last September, Aakar Patel, a journalist and former Amnesty International director, was arrested for posting " " tweets, after which Twitter temporarily suspended his account. One tweet, made in the wake of George Floyd's murder, was about the Black Lives Matter protests in India; another was about the history of Modi's caste and community, a subject Patel spent years researching. (He was released shortly after on anticipatory bail.)

"Nothing I said was false or inaccurate," Patel told CJR after his release. He added that he was not surprised by the government's efforts to take down his tweets. "I don't know if there are too many democracies in the world where without a police complaint, or without any sort of evidence of criminal activities, a government can force Twitter to take something down," Patel said. "But that's what's happening in India."

Before the BJP came to power in 2014, an average of three journalists were arrested per year for dissenting speech, according to the Free Speech Collective, a research and advocacy group promoting freedom of the press and the right to dissent in India. Since then, the number of journalists arrested or informally detained per year has reached an average of 14; in 2020, the number of journalists arrested or detained peaked at 51. The number of people charged with sedition--a colonial-era law still in the country's constitution--has increased by more than a third since 2014. Most are journalists.
"I don't know if there are too many democracies in the world where without a police complaint, or without any sort of evidence of criminal activities, a government can force Twitter to take something down. But that's what's happening in India."
In September 2020, Auqib Javeed, a journalist who worked at the time for and the Kashmir Observer , reported on the disappearance of many Twitter accounts that openly criticized the Indian state's actions in Kashmir, during the weeks leading up to what became one of the longest internet blackouts in the region. "When so many crucial accounts suddenly went black, I wanted to know what happened," Javeed says. "It turns out many of these users were summoned by the police, harassed, given warnings, and verbally abused. Some had to give sworn statements saying they will never say anything negative about the government again." Javeed published his findings on 17 September 2020, under a title calling the Kashmiri police a "cyber bully." The day after the story was published, Javeed was summoned by the police, and harassed and beaten inside a Srinagar police station for hours until he agreed to change the article's headline. He was not formally charged with a crime.

"Journalists who have complaints against their work, get blocked, or have their content taken down are pretty much powerless against the might of social media companies," says Geeta Seshu, founder and lead researcher on the Free Speech Collective's Behind Bars report, which details every official and unofficial detention, arrest and complaint against journalists in the last decade. "Unless it's a prominent figure, most people are just left high and dry-faced alone with unreported, arduous legal cases that drag on for years. We're talking about people thrown in jail just for saying something. That's a very dangerous breakdown of the institutions built to uphold justice."
Methodology
First, I downloaded and compiled data from all of Twitter's transparency reports for India, published every 6 months, beginning in January 2012 until December 2020. The final CSV file contained the total number of legal demands made to Twitter from the Indian government per time period, including the number of tweets flagged for removal and the users flagged for suspension. It also included the total number of tweets and accounts Twitter actually enforced, accompanied by the compliance rate.

To find the actual URLs and accounts flagged for removal, I scraped the Lumen database - a Harvard University initiative monitoring global content removals - using Selenium in Python, filtering for India and Twitter. Since Twitter voluntarily discloses data to Lumen, only about an eighth of the total takedown notices were available. Each notice on their database had some basic information, as well as a PDF file containing the original legal demand. After downloading the PDFs, I ran them through Adobe Acrobat's Optical Character Recognition tool to make the scanned images into searchable text. Then I used text extraction libraries like PyPDF and PDF Plumber to pull out the unstructured text from each file, manually going through for non-English characters and other OCR glitches.

Using regular expressions, I cleaned the text and extracted all the URLs within them into a separate list. I used Twitter's API via Tweepy to obtain information about each tweet and/or Twitter user, including the text of the tweet, the total number of tweets from that user, the bio, and number of followers. While trying to get this information, I discovered that if a user sets their country as anything other than India on Twitter--regardless of where they are actually located physically--the tweets are no longer blocked. I ran the same code twice, so both interfaces can be compared. In total, I was able to find about 500 tweets with text from the original 800 URLs that were tweets; the rest were URLs for accounts in general.

After some cleaning and formatting in Pandas, I used a combination of ScikitLearn, Numpy and a TF/IDF count vectorizer to categorize the tweets for which I had text. I chose eight categories to classify them into, based on a combination of the most frequently occurring words/sentiments, my reporting process and the general context of political events in India over the last decade. Finally, I cleaned and analyzed the data further into smaller CSV files to build a series of charts and graphics, for which I used Flourish, Altair, and Adobe Illustrator.

I also scraped Indian Kanoon, an online database for legal information, for about 1,000 PDFs containing court filings and judgments relating to Article 124A (sedition) in the hope that I could filter for cases based solely on defendants' tweets. After rigorous cleaning and text extraction, the data proved unusable for the purpose of this story. I did, however, go through the data to identify potential sources to contact and case studies to examine further. Through my interviews, I found a report titled 'Behind Bars', published by the Free Speech Collective, from which I extracted data on the arrests, detentions and complaints against journalists.

All of the completed and cleaned CSV files are available on my GitHub repository, as well as the Jupyter notebooks containing the original code used to collect the data.

Paroma Soni is a CJR fellow.

TOP IMAGE: Screenshot of Twitter

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Online censorship is growing in Modi's India

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In June, a video of mob violence in northern India surfaced online. Filmed in a village near Ghaziabad, the video showed people slap and violently harass Abdul Samad Saifi, a 72-year-old man wearing traditionally Muslim clothing. The mob then cuts off his beard while he sobs.

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op-ed, the indigenous rights NGO, Survival International, declares indigenous "uncontacted tribes" in Brazil face genocide under newly-elected president, Jair Bolsonaro. Survival states his new policies will accelerate displacement of indigenous peoples from their ancient lands, bring deadly disease, and increase massacres from agribusiness-supported militia. Sarah Shenker, Brazil campaigner for Survival International, will update us on her group's continued efforts to save various tribes in Brazil from extinction.

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Survival International Accuses Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro of Genocidal Policies Against Indigenous Tribes

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op-ed, the indigenous rights NGO, Survival International, declares indigenous "uncontacted tribes" in Brazil face genocide under newly-elected president, Jair Bolsonaro. Survival states his new policies will accelerate displacement of indigenous peoples from their ancient lands, bring deadly disease, and increase massacres from agribusiness-supported militia.

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Growing Xenophobia And Populism In Italy’s Upcoming Elections

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A look at the big issues and political divisions that surround this weekend’s vote in Italy.

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Matthew Hill, David Campanale and Joel Gunter

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‘Their goal is to destroy everyone’: Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape

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In new testimony, former detainees of China’s detention camps describe systematic rape and torture.

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How White Supremacy Returned to Mainstream Politics

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This report provides a guide to identifying and calling out the white nationalist ideas that are infiltrating U.S. political discourse.

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North Korea - Economy, Resources, Trade: North Korea has a command (centralized) economy. The state controls all means of production, and the government sets priorities and emphases in economic development. Since 1954, economic policy has been promulgated through a series of national economic plans.…

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/29/eastern-european-countries-adopt-authoritarian-measures-covid

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Eastern European countries adopting authoritarian measures in face of Covid

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Analysis reveals widespread violations of international democratic freedoms in response to pandemic

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William N. Trumbull, PhD
Dean and Robert A. Jolley Chair
The Citadel Tommy and Victoria Baker School of Business

To understand the Cuban economy, we have to know the type of economic system that Cuba implemented under Fidel (and now Raúl) Castro. That system is quite unlike the capitalist system that we are used to here in the U.S. I will explain the economic system in Cuba and then discuss the implementation of that system during various periods from what the Cubans call the "Triumph of the Revolution" to today and then add a few words about future prospects for the Cuban economy.
Economic Systems
Cuba has a planned-socialist economy. Planned socialism was the economic system of the Soviet Union, the Soviet-bloc countries like East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Planned socialism was the economic system of Maoist China. For three decades after World War II, about a third of the World's population lived under the planned-socialist economic system. Today, only Cuba and North Korea remain.

Planned socialism and capitalism differ along four distinct dimensions: ownership and control of resources, the structure of decision making and information, the incentives that motivate economic behavior, and the mechanism that coordinates the decisions of economic actors (producers and consumers).

The capitalist system is based on private ownership and control of all resources: labor, capital, land, and entrepreneurship. Planned socialism is based on state ownership of all resources other than labor. While labor is not owned by the state (they are not slave economies!), the planned-socialist state nevertheless exerts a great deal of control over labor and almost total control over all other resources. Of course, there are all sorts of different kinds of labor, from ditch digging to brain surgery but, for our purposes, we'll just lump them into one category. So, whether in a capitalist or a planned-socialist economy, individuals provide labor services and are compensated with wages.

Capital is anything that we produce that we then use to produce other things. A carpenter's hammer is capital. So is an assembly line, a factory building, a forklift, or a truck. In a capitalist economy, capital is privately owned, either by individuals or by firms that are owned by individuals. The income that private owners of capital get is interest. In a planned-socialist economy, there are no private owners of capital - the state owns all capital. Therefore, there is no income that individuals get from capital. All such income goes to the state.

Farmers use land to grow things on. Factories are built on land. In a capitalist economy, land is generally owned by individuals or firms that are, in turn, owned by individuals. The income earned by owners of land is called rent. In a planned-socialist state, the land is generally owned by the state and any income that would have gone to owners of land in a capitalist economy goes to the state.

By the way, there is considerable state ownership of capital and land even in capitalist economies. For instance, we have federal, state, and local parks. We have the military services with all their bases and buildings and equipment like aircraft carriers and tanks and canons. But in a capitalist economy, private ownership of capital and land is by far the dominant form of ownership while it is all but nonexistent in a planned-socialist economy.

The last resource is entrepreneurship. The entrepreneur is the owner of the firm. He or she contracts with providers of labor, capital, and land and pays them whatever wages, interest, and rent is owed them. Of course, a firm has to pay for all sort of things they purchase from other firms. For instance, the power company produces electricity, much of which it sells to other firms that produce cars and shirts and corn. An automobile manufacturer buys tires, headlights, upholstery, paint, and all sorts of things that go into its cars. We call these things that firms buy from other firms intermediate products. So what does the entrepreneur get out of all this? Profit, of course. Profit is whatever is left over from the firm's revenue after paying for all the resources and intermediate products that go into its product. Note what is different about profit as compared to the income to owners of the other resources. Those who provide labor services know what they will be paid, since the wage is agreed on in advance. So is interest and rent. But the entrepreneur does not know what profit is in advance. It could be a lot, it could be little, it could even be negative. Thus, the entrepreneur is the risk taker in any productive enterprise in a capitalist economy. It is this risk-taking role of the entrepreneur that we need to focus on here. The entrepreneur may also manage the firm but this activity is a form of labor. He or she may also provide capital and land to the enterprise. It is the entrepreneur's assumption of risk that is the resource that is distinctive from other resources. In a planned socialist economy, there are no individuals who provide this resource, since there are no private enterprises.

To summarize this first dimension over which capitalist and planned socialist economies differ, all productive resources are generally privately owned and controlled in a capitalist economy, while all non-labor productive resources are owned and controlled by the state in a planned-socialist economy (with considerable control, though not ownership, of labor). In the most fully implemented planned-socialist economies, there is no private property. It is true that individuals own clothes, furniture, kitchen appliances, and even tools, like hammers and screw drivers for use around the home (as opposed to use in a productive enterprise like a factory or farm where they are forms of capital). The planned-socialist economies tend to not refer to this sort of ownership as "private property." Rather, they tend to use the term "personal property." The difference may seem purely semantic, but private property is really not very consistent with socialist ideology and there have been attempts to eliminate even these relatively minor examples of personal property. The most well-known is China's Great Leap Forward of the 1950s when much of the population was organized in massive communes where the people were housed and clothed and fed by local units of the state. This experiment in pushing the system to extremes did not last long and it did not end well. Tens of millions starved. This kind of great leap forward was tried in Cuba during the mid to late 1960s. That did not go well, either.

The second dimension is the decision-making and information structure. The decision-making and information structure is highly decentralized in a capitalist economy but highly centralized in a planned-socialist economy.

In a capitalist economy like we have in the U.S., there are many, many thousands of businesses producing goods and services and millions and millions of consumers. Each firm makes its own decisions about what to produce, how to produce, what prices to charge, and how their products will be marketed. Consumers are all making their own decisions on what to buy, within the constraints of their budgets. No one is telling anyone what to do. If General Motors decides to stop producing cars and start producing bicycles instead, there is no one to tell them they cannot. Thus, decision making is decentralized with individual economic agents, producers and consumers, making their own independent decisions.

These individual decisions are based on information, which flows horizontally between market participants in a capitalist economy. Information is generally of three types. The first is price, which is determined by the forces of supply and demand. When you decide to look into buying a car, say, you are obviously going to be interested in the prices of various models. Price is a very important form of information in a capitalist economy because price acts as a signal that drives resources. If the price of a good goes up, say because more people want to buy it, that will make producing it more profitable, so firms will devote more resources to producing it. Another way to put this is that price signals a change in scarcity. When a good or service or resource becomes more scarce, either because of an increase in demand or a decrease in supply, the forces of supply and demand drive the price up. The increased price encourages producers to find ways to supply more and it encourages consumers to buy less, exactly the right responses to an increase in scarcity. Finally, price, as determined in a properly functioning market, is a measure of value. In other words, we use price as a measure of the value of all goods and services. Thus, we can meaningfully talk about how many dollars worth of cars a dealership sold last month even though it sold many different kinds of cars. It is also meaningful to talk about the value of all cars sold in the U.S. last year. And it is meaningful to add up all the prices charged for all the goods and services produced in the U.S. even though we produced many different things, as we do with the measure known as gross domestic product.

Another type of information is descriptive data. That car you might be interested in buying has all sorts of characteristics that you would want to know about, like gas mileage, acceleration, leg room, trunk space, and so on. Note that each of these has its own unit of measure. Gas mileage is measured in miles per gallon. Acceleration is usually expressed as the time it takes to reach 60 miles per hour. Leg room in inches. Trunk space in cubic inches. Unlike dollars, these measures are non-additive. That is, you cannot get meaningful information by adding gas mileage and trunk space, since each is measured in different units.

The third type of information is commands. Commands are common within firms in a capitalist economy and certainly within state structures like the military. However, they are relatively rare between the state and individual firms.

The decision-making and information structure is highly centralized in a planned-socialist economy. The state in a fully-implemented planned-socialist economy controls every productive activity from the largest factory to the smallest retail outlet. There are no individual firms or farms or shops. All are part of a single entity, the state. Thus, a factory producing gloves in Vladivostok and the grocery store in Kaliningrad (eight time zones apart!) were all part of a single organization in the Soviet Union. The state decided how many gloves that Vladivostok factory would produce, what resources it would get to produce those gloves, where the factory would send the gloves it produced, what price it would get for its gloves, and what prices it would pay for the resources and intermediate goods it used to produce its gloves. At the same time, the state decided what that grocery store in Kaliningrad would sell, how much it would sell, and the prices it would receive for everything it sold. Thus, decision making on the production side of a planned-socialist economy is highly centralized. Even on the consumption side, there is little decision-making autonomy for individuals relative to the autonomy individuals enjoy in a capitalist economy. Since the state decides what will be produced, it can give consumers very limited choices. In fact, consumption goods have always been very low on production priorities in these economies. Further, for various reasons, the system results in shortages of most consumer products and services, including basic needs like housing. (For instance, in the Soviet Union, the waiting time for a young person's first apartment was about fifteen years. If the state planners detected the wait time getting shorter, they would order fewer apartments be constructed. If the wait time got longer they would order more.) So consumers have few choices to make and whenever they did go shopping, they would be confronted by empty shelves. Here is a picture I took in the shoe department of a Soviet department store. If you look closely at the picture, you will notice that there is exactly one shoe to choose from, perhaps in various sizes. If that's the shoe you want, then you're in luck! Finally, the state provides for free or at highly subsidized prices much of what consumers in a capitalist economy would have to purchase at market prices, including education (K through Ph.D.), health care, transportation, housing, and some foods and other basic necessities. Workers in a planned-socialist economy receive very low wages. The average monthly wage for a Cuban state worker is around $25. This works because there is almost nothing to buy. Instead, the state provides and, therefore, the state decides.

Information flows in a centralized decision-making structure such as this are primarily vertical. Commands flow down through the hierarchy to each enterprise and descriptive information flows back up as enterprises report on their progress in meeting these commands. There is little horizontal communication, and prices, which are set by the planners and not by markets, are of little importance because they convey little useful information, though consumers do have to take prices into account as they make their buying decisions, however constrained those decisions might be. By the way, scholars of the planned-socialist system often use the term "command economies," which emphasizes the importance of commands in a centralized socialist economy.

To summarize the differences in decision-making and information structures, capitalism has a relatively decentralized structure with individual economic agents (producers and consumers) making their own decisions based, in part, on horizontal flows of information between buyers and sellers in the form of prices and descriptive information. (I should point out, though, that even in the most free-market capitalist economies, there are some vertical flows of commands. I mentioned, for instance, that no one can tell General Motors that it cannot stop making cars tomorrow. That's true but, as long as General Motors does make cars, there is a regulatory structure that requires General Motors to install seat belts and airbags, meet fuel-efficiency standards, and all sorts of other things.) Planned-socialist economies have relatively centralized decision-making and information structures with all productive units following the decisions of the state administrative hierarchy with mostly vertical flows of information in the form of commands flowing from the center to individual enterprises and descriptive information flowing from enterprises to the center.

Our third dimension is the motivation structure. There are two types of incentives that motivate us: material and non-material (or moral).

What is it that motivates economic actors to make economic decisions? For instance, what motivates us to work? Is it the wage we get paid? Wage is an example of a material incentive. So is a bonus. Interest, rent, and profit from supplying non-labor factors of production are material incentives. Perhaps you are also motivated by a sense of duty to others. Or you may seek praise from your superiors. Or status. These are non-material or moral incentives. All economic systems rely primarily on material incentives. The difference is that there is relatively little use of moral incentives in capitalism and a whole lot in planned socialism.

The final dimension is coordination. In a capitalist economy like the U.S., hundreds of millions of individuals are making consumption decisions every day and many millions of producers are supplying products. And each consumer and each producer is making independent decisions without any guidance from a central authority. What coordinates all these independent decisions? By what miracle, for instance, do we go to the supermarket looking for apples and always find there a large selection of apples from which to choose but with plenty of room for all sorts of other products we might also want? In a capitalist economy, the market coordinates economic activity. If producers supply more of a good or service than consumers are willing to buy, the excess supply drives the price down. As price falls, consumers become willing to buy more and producers find it less profitable to supply so much. This process continues until the quantity that producers bring to market is exactly matched by the quantity that consumers are buying. If consumers want to buy more than producers are supplying, the price gets bid up making it more profitable for producers to supply to the market but, at the same time, discouraging consumption. This process continues until the quantity that producers bring to market is exactly matched by the quantity that consumers are buying.

There are, of course, many consumers and many producers in a planned-socialist economy (though all producers are mere branches of a single entity, the state), but there are no markets to coordinate activity. In other words, the market forces of supply and demand that determine what will be produced and how much of them to produce and the best way to produce them and what prices to charge are absent in a planned-socialist economy. Instead of the market, the plan coordinates economic decision making (thus the term "planned socialism"). The plan takes close to a year to construct and requires a huge bureaucracy. It begins with a highly aggregated set of basic economic goals for the year and ends with a highly detailed set of instructions for every state enterprise (factories, farms, hospitals, construction enterprises, transportation enterprises, shops) on what to produce, how much to produce, how to produce, what resources it will be allocated, and what prices it will pay for resources and intermediate products, what prices it will pay for its products, and where to send its products. Plan fulfillment is rewarded with bonuses (about a third of total household income in the Soviet Union came from bonuses). Enterprise managers who do a good job fulfilling their plan were also rewarded with promotions. Failure to fulfill planned requirements means the loss of the bonus and possible demotions for managers.

Cuba's implementation of planned socialism

Now that we know something about the type of economic system Cuba has today, let's focus on what the Cuban economy that got replaced looked like. That replacement began January 1, 1959 when Fidel Castro's troops entered Havana, just hours after the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the country. This is the date Cubans call the "Triumph of the Revolution."

In the 1950s, Cuba was a middle-income developing capitalist country. According to Ward and Devereaux (2012), Cuba's per capita income in the mid-1950s was about the same as Italy's. It was three times higher than that of neighboring Dominican Republic and about nine times higher than Haiti's. It was three times higher than Brazil's. It was about sixty percent higher than Mexico's and seventy percent higher than Costa Rica's and about eighty percent higher than Panama's. It was about 17 percent higher than Chile's. In all of Latin America and the Caribbean, only Uruguay, Argentina, and Venezuela had higher per capita incomes and then only by a small amount. In other words, Cuba was a fairly well-off country, at least by Latin American and Caribbean standards. Other measures of living standard are even more impressive. In 1955, Cuba had a car-ownership rate two and a half times that of the Latin American average. TV ownership was nearly seven times the Latin American average in 1960. The infant mortality rate in 1955 was a third the Latin American average in 1955 and about the same as Europe's. Life expectancy was 64 years, 14 years higher than the Latin American average. The number of doctors per capita was about on par with Europe and two and a half times the Latin American average. Finally, literacy was 79 percent while the Latin American average was 58 percent.

Why, if Cuba was so prosperous, was there a revolution? A complete answer to this question would take us somewhat far from the main topic of this essay. A few observations will suffice for our purposes here. First, Cuba was relatively prosperous in the 1950s because it had been even more prosperous in the 1920s, according to Ward and Devereux (2012). In 1925, Cuba's per capita income and consumption levels were comparable to Europe's and considerably higher than Italy's. During that time, Cuba had a fairly free-market environment and world sugar prices were high. However, starting in the late 1920s, a series of labor and product market regulations were imposed with the result that, by the 1950s, markets had become badly distorted and inefficient. Also, the Great Depression caused world sugar prices to fall, which had a devastating impact on the Cuban economy, since sugar production was a mainstay of the economy. Thus, from the late 1920s through the 1950s until 1959, the Cuban economy, especially in terms of household consumption, stagnated and may have even shrunk.

Another cause of discontent was that the distribution of income and wealth was extremely unequal. Most of the wealth and income-earning opportunities were in Havana and a few other urban centers, and even in the cities there was substantial unemployment. Most of the people in the countryside depended on seasonal work in the sugarcane fields and whatever they could scrape from subsistence farming. While overall literacy was high relative to Latin American standards, in the rural areas literacy was very low.

Finally, the Cuban people were suffering under a repressive and corrupt dictatorship since 1952 when Fulgencio Batitsta staged a military coup and suspended the constitution and all its guarantees of human rights. By 1959, Havana had become a mafia-dominated mecca for gambling and prostitution and much of the economy was dominated by U.S. ownership. There was widespread support from all classes to get rid of Batista. There was not, however, widespread support for a socialist economy but Fidel Castro did not announce the socialist character of the Revolution until 1961.

Fidel Castro had five economic goals for the Revolution (Mesa-Lago, 1981):

Achieve rapid economic growth.

Reduce dependency on sugar through rapid industrialization and diversification of agriculture.

Reduce dependency on the U.S.

Achieve full employment.

Redistribute income more equally.

Since these were his stated goals, it would seem fair to evaluate the Revolution by reference to them.

Mesa-Lago (1981) divides the early socialist period into five stages, with the first four occurring in the first decade or so. The first decade was a period of disruption and reversals of course reflecting a struggle between idealism and pragmatism. Starting in 1971, the regime finally commits (sort of) to central planning until another reversal of course, the sixth stage called the "process of rectification of errors and negative tendencies," or the rectification period for short, which Mesa-Lago (2000) describes. Then in the early '90s, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba enters yet another stage, the "special period in time of peace," which we will discuss a little later.

The graph below shows national income (as measured by gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation) from 1959 to 1993, divided into four periods. The first period, which I label "period of reversals" corresponds to Mesa-Lago's (1981) first four periods of disruption and reversals of course.
Source: The Maddison-Project, 2013 version.
There was no stated ideological basis guiding economic policy during the first two years as it was not until 1961 that Fidel Castro announced the socialist character of the Revolution. The goal was simply to take from the enemies of the Revolution. The result, though, looks very much as if the intent were to build a socialist economy. There were successive rounds of collectivization and nationalization, which destroyed the foundations of the market economy. The professional and managerial class was forced out, as these persons were seen as enemies of the Revolution. Jobs were assigned according to revolutionary credentials rather than expertise. Finally, trade shifted away from the U.S., which imposed a trade embargo, to the Soviet Union and China.

For a couple years after Castro's announcement that the Revolution was socialist, there was a half-hearted attempt to institute central planning. It did not get very far since there was no one trained in the rather complex mechanisms of planning and Castro just was not interested. Central planning to the extent that it did exist prioritized heavy industry, which was clearly inappropriate for an agricultural economy like Cuba's. It also attempted to become more self-sufficient, that is, to close off trade, which is typical of planned-socialist economies. By 1963, agricultural output had fallen 23 percent below its 1958 level. The fall in agricultural outputs and consumer goods created huge shortages, which required rationing, which continues today. It also resulted in the emergence of black markets. Trade with the U.S. and other capitalist economies was cut off and replaced by the Soviet Union and Soviet-bloc countries. Cuba was importing all its oil from the Soviet Union, pretty much all on credit, so its debt to the Soviet Union skyrocketed.

In 1964, an ideological debate broke out between the idealistic Maoists, led by Che Guevara and inspired by China's Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, and the followers of the Soviet economist Evsei Liberman, whose writings are generally credited with inspiring Soviet and Soviet-bloc reforms of the 1960s that helped to revitalize those economies, which were fast becoming moribund. Che ended up getting himself killed in 1967 attempting to foment revolution in Bolivia. Though Che was dead, or perhaps because he was dead, Mao-Guevarist ideology triumphed over the Libermanists. This was a period of radical collectivization. The state either nationalized private plots or subjected them to increased acopio (a system in which private farmers are required to deliver a large portion of their product to the state at state-determined prices). What was left of a non-agricultural private sector was eliminated, including some 56,000 small businesses like food vendors, barber shops, restaurants, bars, and handicraft shops. The normal methods of central planning were rejected in favor of ad hoc allocation by the revolutionary leadership. Monetary calculation and market mechanisms to incentivize behavior were eliminated, including in agriculture. Cuba entered its own Great Leap Forward, and like the Great Leap forward in China, it was not a success.

The goal was rapid industrialization. Thus, capital accumulation was prioritized over consumption but capital investment was irrational, leading to a sharp fall in capital productivity. There was also a sharp drop in labor productivity as material incentives were reduced in favor of mass labor mobilizations. The lack of planning resulted in all sorts of bottlenecks as inputs became unavailable to enterprises, which were then unable to produce assigned outputs. Imported equipment and machines were left to rot on the docks. Newly completed factories were left closed because of missing components. Maintenance was neglected (a common problem in the socialist world), causing the shutdown of factories and power plants.

The trade deficit with the Soviet Union increased, increasing Cuba's dependence on the Soviet Union. At the same time, the Soviet leadership became increasingly irritated by the Cubans' assertion that Cuba has taken the lead in the development of the socialist economy. Cuba publicly rejected the Soviet Union's incrementalist approach to socialist development, its dependence on technical planning by bureaucrats, and on material incentives, which Cuba perceived as a betrayal of Marxist ideology. In 1968, the Soviet Union retaliated by reducing its oil shipments.

Growth was generally negative. While there was full employment in the sense that everyone had a job, much of this labor was wasted. Labor absenteeism reached 20 percent. The distribution of income became flatter as wage differentials and bonuses were reduced.

Thus the first decade ends in chaos. Growth was slow, especially for a low-middle income, developing country, which would normally be in a fast-growth stage of development. In fact, the well-known Maddison dataset (from which I constructed the graph above) shows Cuba's per capita GDP slightly lower in 1969 than in 1959. According to these data, per capita growth was more or less flat the first several years. There was a spurt in 1966-7 and then a crash during the disastrous Mao-Guevarist attempt to leapfrog socialist development. This slow growth was a result of the destruction of material incentives, the numerous changes in economic organization as Cuba embraced and then rejected planning, the exodus of technically trained professional and managerial talent, overall low world prices of sugar, irrational investment decisions creating massive inefficiencies and low productivity, and the heavy burden of ramping up the military and subversion abroad. And there was the U.S. embargo, which, during that time, was supported by the members of the Organization of American States.

The distribution of income was distinctly flatter. In large part, this was a result of the rich emigrating. It was also due to the loss of household income from the nationalization of capital and land. The state set wages so as to achieve a more equal distribution of income, especially during the Mao-Guevarist period. Everyone had a job, and therefore a paycheck (of sorts), even if there was nothing to do at work.

Cuba certainly succeeded in its goal of reducing its dependency on the U.S. However, what it got in exchange was as great a dependency on another country, the Soviet Union.

Despite its attempts to industrialize, Cuba failed in its goal to reduce its dependency on sugar during this period.

After the failed Mao-Guevarist period, the regime turned to the Soviet Union for help. They admitted that the foundations of socialism had first to be laid so that the economy could be developed and put on a sound footing as the consciousness of the population was raised. They admitted, as well, that the Soviet Union was much further along in developing their socialist economy and that theirs was the model to follow. In particular, they recognized the importance of a highly institutionalized model of central planning and the importance of using material incentives, including market mechanisms, where appropriate, to motivate desired behaviors. For instance, the acopio system was continued, but private farmers were paid higher prices for their state deliveries and permitted to sell their surpluses on free farmers' markets at market prices.

With the help of Soviet and Czech planning experts, Cuba constructed a proper planning structure complete with vertical channels of information and control. In 1972, Cuba was incorporated into COMECON, the socialist trading bloc orchestrated by Moscow, which cemented Cuba's dependency on sugar. By 1976, Cuba launched its first five-year plan. Enterprises were managed by experts trained in enterprise management, replacing managers whose only credentials were loyalty to the Revolution.

There was considerable decentralization, with 300 enterprises broken up into 3,000, each on a self-financing basis in which prices were set to cover input costs. Each enterprise had an account at the central bank where it could borrow funds to finance day-to-day operations (working capital). They reintroduced the Soviet system of work quotas and wage scales reflecting differences in skills, relative scarcity, undesirable conditions, location, etc. The bonus system was reintroduced. And, to make wage differentials meaningful, there was an increased supply of consumer goods.

The result was an impressive growth spurt thanks to a far more efficient organization of the economy, improved individual incentives, more rational allocation of capital, reliance on trained engineers, enterprise managers, and skilled workers rather than political cadres, and mechanization of the sugar industry. In addition, the Soviet Union provided additional credits and postponed repayments of Cuba's debt and the U.S. eased somewhat its embargo. Finally, Cuba benefited from an increase in the world price of sugar. However, growth slowed in the mid '80s with a slump in the world price of sugar and a leveling off of industrial output. Income distribution became less equal during this period with the reintroduction of material incentives, increased use of market-based prices, curtailment of some free social services, and the laying off of surplus labor to increase efficiency.

Cuba had continued decent (by Cuban standards) growth in the first half of the 1980s. This was a period of large increases in both labor and capital and massive Soviet subsidies primarily in the form of the highly favorable price (in the form of oil) the Soviets paid for Cuban sugar. The increase in labor came from a dramatic rise in the female labor-force participation rate and a baby boom in the early '60s. While the quantity of labor and capital inputs was increasing, the quality of labor, that is, labor productivity, was stagnant, while capital productivity was falling.

Growth peaked in the mid '80s and then became negative as Cuba exhausted its ability to throw additional labor and capital into production. Exports stagnated and both trade and government budget deficits increased. By the mid-1980s, these problems became obvious to the Cuban leadership, who started to question the applicability of the Soviet model to the Cuban situation. In 1986, they launched the "process of rectification of errors and negative tendencies." The so-called Rectification Period was yet another reversal of course. There was a return to labor mobilization and farmers' and artisans' markets were yet again outlawed.

Were Fidel and the Cuban leadership correct in asserting that the Soviet model was inappropriate for Cuba? Certainly by the 1980s, and especially by the second half of the 1980s, the Soviet model was not working well even in the Soviet Union. The 1980s had been a period of stagnation in the Soviet Union and by 1989 GDP peaked and turned negative. Nevertheless, the Soviet model had served the Soviet Union more or less well for six decades. But the Soviet Union was a huge resource-rich country that could afford to close itself off from the outside. Cuba was a small resource-poor country that could not afford to be closed and was certainly in no position to ignore economic realities. But what were its options, if not a market economy? Certainly not the Mao-Guevarist model that it attempted to implement in the late '60s.

Cuba was facing a problem shared by all economies, whatever the economic system, that are dependent on supplying a basic commodity. While sugar had made Cuba wealthy in the past, it faced the reality that, in the long run, the terms of trade tend to turn against suppliers of basic commodities. This was certainly the case for Cuba. For instance, in 1959, a 60 horse-power tractor could have been imported with the proceeds of 24 tons of sugar but by 1982 a comparable tractor cost Cuba 115 tons of sugar. In 1960, a ton of coffee (another important Cuban export) bought 37.3 tons of fertilizer but by 1982 a ton of coffee bought only 15.8 tons of fertilizer. Yet, it was locked in as a supplier of basic commodities by its COMECON relationship.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and shortly after the Soviet-bloc countries abandoned COMECON and launched their transitions to capitalism. In 1991, the Soviet Union disintegrated and the newly-independent states of the former Soviet Union launched their own transitions. COMECON was essentially no more. Thus, Cuba lost its primary trading relationships. It also lost its subsidies from the Soviet Union. Between 1989 and 1993 Cuba's economy contracted by over a third during a time when the rest of Latin America was growing rapidly.

The Economic Reforms of the Special Period

The following graph shows GDP growth for the years 1990 to 2016. The information is the same as the previous graph but simply replaces GDP in each year with the percent change in GDP. Note the overlap of the years 1990 to 1993 in the two graphs. Thus, the graph below corresponds to the dramatic fall in GDP at the end of the previous graph.
Source: The Maddison-Project, 2013 version. Updated from CIA WorldFactbook
Between 1989 and 1993, Cuba's economy contracted by a little over one third. It lost some 80 percent of both imports (mostly oil) and exports with the collapse of the Soviet Union and COMECON. And it lost its subsidies from the Soviet Union, which had been importing Cuban sugar for its oil on terms that were extremely favorable for Cuba. In fact, the Soviet Union had been selling so much oil to Cuba at below-market prices that the Cubans then turned around and resold so much on world markets that petroleum products became Cuba's second largest export. Not bad for a country that produced virtually no oil!

Although outright starvation was averted, there was certainly malnutrition. The average adult lost 20 pounds and infant growth was stunted. Power outages were widespread and could last most of the day. Most public transportation ground to a halt. This truly was a crisis. Suddenly, Cuba found its socialist economy adrift in an ocean of capitalism. Something had to be done. What was done was yet another reversal of course. The Cubans referred to this time as the "Special Period in Time of Peace," or Special Period for short.

With the loss of its socialist trading partners, since socialism no longer existed outside of North Korea, which hardly represented an opportunity, there was no longer any question that Cuba would have to find a way to operate in a capitalist world. It was also evident that Cuba lacked the capacity to feed itself and provide for other forms of consumption. It could no longer be a closed economy and would have to learn to trade in a capitalist world that does not obey central plans.

What emerged was a "dual economy model." One economy, including the main state enterprises, hospitals, and schools, would operate as before under central planning. However, a new emerging economy operating under market rules (sort of) would be permitted. Thus, there emerged a new private sector. Individuals could apply for "self-employment" licenses to engage in private-sector activities, producing and selling goods and services for the domestic population and tourists. The emerging economy also included foreign businesses that could form joint ventures with Cuban enterprises or foreign firms opening offices in Cuba. And it included private-sector activities of select state enterprises that were allowed to engage in trade using foreign currencies as long as such trade was profitable.

Another, perhaps surprising, element of the reforms was the dollarization of the emerging economy. The US dollar was legalized and required for transactions in the emerging economy.

It is important to keep in mind that the intent of these so-called reforms was not transition to a market economy. Rather, the stated intent was to preserve socialism while trying to integrate into a capitalist world. Unfortunately, this attempt to integrate into the capitalist world created all sorts of contradictions and ideological confusion. The reforms were also too shallow to have a major impact, though they did stop the collapse, and were subject to reversals, since Fidel saw them as a pact with the Devil. The attempt to insulate Cubans from the evils of capitalism limited the impact of foreign investment.

The reforms certainly wreaked havoc with the socialist notion of a classless society, creating a class of persons who had access to dollars, whose income potential was huge compared to those who did not. It also resulted in Cubans being placed in an inferior position relative to foreigners. Cubans could not enter the new fancy hotels. Cubans were prohibited from eating lobster and beef so as to ensure supplies for the tourists. Cubans could not afford to eat in the new restaurants catering to foreigners. Cubans could not ride in the new taxis imported for use by tourists. Cubans suddenly became subservient to foreigners, including perhaps the clearest expression of subservience, prostitution, which became rampant.

References to the Special Period start to fade by the end of the '90s after which there is a significant retrenchment of reforms (2001-2004) and recentralization (2004-2006) at the end of the Fidel Castro period. Now, under Raúl Castro, there is yet another reversal and a major expansion of the private sector, as well as other market-oriented reforms.

Initially, this pact with the Devil was quite successful. The economic collapse bottomed out in 1994 and the economy started growing again. By 1996, growth was nearly eight percent. However, progress on economic reforms came to a crashing halt in 1996. Self-employment licenses were reduced and new regulations and taxes imposed. Reformist academics were demoted or purged. This happened despite the success of the reforms in stopping the economy's free fall and generating real GDP growth. By 1997, GDP growth had slowed to 2.5 percent and only 1.2 percent in 1998. It surged again in 1999 and 2000 because tourism was taking off and because of foreign investment in oil (which, so far, has turned out to be a bust) and mining, but the rest of the economy was stagnant. The regime just could not stand it anymore. Fidel especially saw these reforms as a pact with the Devil, a betrayal of the socialist promise, and he was determined to put a stop to reforms as soon as he could.

Then came 2001. By this time, foreign investors were getting fed up and were pulling out. Tourism was maturing and the Dot.com recession of 2001 hit Cuban tourism hard, especially after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The recession also caused remittances (the Cuban diaspora sending money to family left behind in Cuba) to fall. The sugar harvest came in well below targets. Russia closed a huge military installation (the Lourdes listening post), causing a loss of $200 million per year in rent alone. And then Cuba got smacked by Hurricane Michelle, the most destructive since Hurricane Fox in 1952. Yet, Cuba announced the following year that GDP in 2001 had increased 3 percent. This was impossible. Cuba was clearly contracting and everyone knew it.

Cuba was starting to cook the books.

In 2004, Cuba announced the adoption of their own unique methodology to calculate national income, making it impossible to compare Cuba's GDP with its own past or with any other country. Under this new methodology, Cuba's stated GDP surged. Then in 2005 they recalculated the value of the medical services Cuba was providing to other countries like Venezuela resulting in an 80 percent increase in the health sector in a single year.

Under this new methodology, Cuba's growth came in at a whopping 11.2 percent in 2005 despite a fall in oil and gas production (such as it was), flat nickel production (though price did rise), a sharp drop in sugar production, a severe drought in the first half of 2005, and three major hurricanes. Then in 2006, Cuba claimed a GDP increase of 12.1 percent, which, if true, would have made Cuba the fastest growing economy in the world. Obviously, it was not.

Then Cuba hit a brick wall. Even under its new GDP methodology, reported GDP growth fell precipitously, falling to 1.4 percent in 2009, increasing a little for a few years, and then falling again to 1 percent in 2014. Thanks to a surge of tourism after the opening up that was announced by Raúl Castro and Barack Obama in December, 2014, growth was a fairly respectable 4.3 percent in 2015 but turned negative in 2016 and will probably turn out even worse in 2017. This despite the economic and political reforms under Raúl Castro that have been so much in the news the past several years. Let's turn now to those reforms under Raúl Castro.

Reforms under Raúl Castro

Fidel Castro suddenly entered a hospital in 2006 for abdominal surgery. The surgery apparently did not go well and, in July, he handed over the powers of President to his brother Raúl. This arrangement was meant to be temporary but it eventually became apparent that Fidel would never return to office so, in February of 2008, the National Assembly elected Raúl President. During his time as Acting President, Raúl was understandably hesitant to enact sweeping reforms. Nevertheless, reform was clearly needed.

After half a century of (half-baked) central planning, Cuba was facing social and economic crisis, necessitating, from the regime's perspective, outright lying about the state of the economy. Reform could be put off for a time, thanks to the support of Venezuela, which was swapping its oil for health care services on terms that were very favorable to Cuba, much as the Soviet Union had once swapped oil for sugar, but it was becoming increasingly clear that that support was not going to last much longer. According to Carmelo Mesa-Lago (2013), growth by 2013 was slowing dramatically, fixed capital investment had fallen to almost nothing, industrial production was 55 percent lower now than it was in 1989, sugar production was down from 8 million tons in 1989 to 1.3 tons, overall food production was down, natural resource (oil, gas, nickel) production peaked in '06-'08 but then started to fall, hotel occupancy was falling (though it is up now, thanks to Obama), trade deficits were worsening, the economy was becoming increasingly dependent on Venezuela (which is clearly unsustainable, since Venezuela is on the verge of collapse), real salaries had declined by 72 percent, social services, including health care and education, were declining, almost 1.8 million workers in the state sector were redundant, and there was a huge housing shortage.

Mesa-Lago categorizes the reforms of the Raúl regime into two types, administrative and structural. Administrative reforms do not alter the structure of the system. Rather, they merely alter rules that are not directly related to the system without changing its basic character. Structural reforms, on the other hand, are much deeper, to the point that the nature of the system itself is changed. Raúl's reforms were limited to the administrative sort initially when there was still the expectation that Fidel would eventually resume his role as President. Structural reforms began only after Raúl was elected President by the National Assembly and Raúl felt that he had consolidated his control.

Administrative reforms began early and continue. They mostly have to do with lifting irritating prohibitions that effectively made Cubans second-class citizens in their own country. These include allowing Cubans to book rooms in hotels that had previously been reserved for international tourists only. Since most Cubans lack the income to stay in such hotels, this makes little difference as a practical matter, except for the few Cubans who have sufficient access to dollars who can now enjoy these facilities, which exacerbates the distinction between those who have access to dollars and those who do not. Similarly, Cubans can now purchase computers and cell phones. Again, for most Cubans, these are simply out of reach. They can also buy new cars now, though the huge state markup places new cars far beyond the reach of almost all Cubans. The following is from a July 1, 2014 NBC online news article:

Cuba's 11 national car dealerships sold just 50 cars and four motorcycles in the first half of the year under a new law that removed limits on auto purchases for the first time in half a century. Cubans had welcomed the new law which removed limits on auto purchases, but many are in sticker shock at the 400-percent markup. Cuba has said it would invest 75 percent of the sales' proceeds for its public transportation system, but total sales at the country's dealerships reached just $1.28 million. A Peugeot dealership in Havana was pricing its 2013 model 206 at $91,000 when the new rules came into effect, and it wanted $262,000 for the sportier 508. Most state workers make around $20 a month. In 2011, Cuba started allowing people to buy and sell used cars from each other. Before then, only cars that were in Cuba before the 1959 revolution could be freely bought and sold, which is why there are so many U.S.-made, vintage 1950s cars on the streets.

In 2013, Cuba abolished the exit permit that had been required to travel abroad. Cubans can now, in theory, come and go as they like (subject, of course, to getting visas from the countries they want to travel to). In practice, there are all sorts of ways to restrict travel and most dissidents are not allowed to travel. Also, most Cubans cannot afford the cost.

Cubans can now buy and sell houses. Previously, there was a system in which Cubans could trade apartments and houses. In other words, if I wanted a house closer to town, I would have to find someone who wanted a house where I live. The houses would have to be substantially alike, according to the rules. As you can imagine, Cubans came up with all sorts of ways to get around these rules, and some Cubans made a living brokering deals in what developed into an almost full-blown real-estate market that barely bothered to even acknowledge the formal rules, so this reform basically legalized what had already become a de facto reality.

Structural reforms did not begin until 2008, after Raúl was more or less out from under Fidel's influence. Again, these reforms are more likely to go to the heart of socialism. They affect the nature of the system. They renege on the promises of socialism. In no particular order, these reforms involve the distribution of idle state land to households, reduction of state expenditures, reduction of public-sector employment, and the expansion of self-employment.

Distribution of Idle Land

Individuals were given usufruct rights to land the state wasn't using with the requirement that the right-holder would grow crops and contribute to the state's food-production targets. Usufruct gives the individual the right to use the land for profit but not own it. The farmer must get state approval for whatever he or she plans to grow. If approved, the state takes 70 percent of the harvest and pays the state-administered prices, which, of course, are below market price. That is a pretty big disincentive. The farmer still has to purchase inputs, such as fertilizer and seed, from the state, which continues to monopolize inputs. The farmer cannot hire labor, so the whole things has to be a family affair. And, until recently, the farmer was not permitted to build on the land. Even now that building is permitted, the state could always take the land away, along with the building, once the contract period is over. Most of this land is covered with marabú, an invasive tree from Africa that is extraordinarily tough to clear away. The upshot of all this is that food-production targets are not being met, which means Cuba continues to import most of its food.

Reduction of State Expenditures

Cuba cut expenditures across the board. One of the ways they did this was by closing work-place cafeterias that had been providing free lunches or converting cafeterias into worker cooperatives (see below) that charge for the lunches they provide. This was hugely unpopular. For many workers, these free lunches were a substantial part of their diet. Similarly, the state closed universities and schools and made cuts in health care. The monthly ration was also cut. Cubans have ration books (right), called libreta, that permit them to purchase bulk staples each month at special ration stores at very low peso prices. Prior to this cut, these rations would typically last people about ten days. Anything consumed beyond these rations has to be purchased in markets at market prices, which is hard on a $25 monthly wage. Recall that the state had always justified its low wages on the grounds that the state provides most of the people's needs. These cuts mean that the state is, at least in part, reneging on the fundamental promise of socialism that the state provides for the people's needs. Maintenance, already sorely inadequate was further reduced. Unfinished investment projects were further delayed. All of this was an effort to reduce the budget deficit, since deficits have to be covered by borrowing, which is very hard to do for Cuba.

Reduce Public-sector Employment

Raúl announced that one million workers in the state sector were redundant and would need to be laid off. That is approximately one in every five state workers! This is a really dramatic retreat from the promise of guaranteed employment - economic security - in a socialist economy. Of all the structural reforms of the Raúl era, this is the biggest. So big, in fact, it keeps getting put off. There has been little headway on this.

Self-employment

Self-employment goes hand in hand with the goal of reducing public-sector employment. The idea is that as workers get laid off from the public sector they find employment in the private sector as self-employed entrepreneurs. The problem with this plan is that those who are entering self-employment are primarily those who were operating in the underground economy prior to legal self-employment, as well as retirees. Thus, self-employment is not absorbing laid-off state workers and, as a consequence, lay-offs are being delayed.

Of course, self-employment dates back to 1993 under Fidel, so this is not new under Raúl. What is new is a renewed emphasis on self-employment specifically as a strategy tied to the retreat of the state sector. In 2010, the state published a new list of 181 activities authorized for self-employment. These are practically all services and in low-priority sectors. Included in the list was offering one's services as a clown. It included hairdressing and taxi services. By the way, this last, taxi services, has resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of classic '50s American cars on the road as run-down clunkers suddenly become an asset, after extensive rehabilitation. Not only has self-employment meant more taxi services, it has also resulted in new business restoring these old clunkers.

This list gets expanded from time to time and is now a little over 200 but the general characteristics of the list remain unchanged. An occupation that competes with anything the State is interested in doing does not get on the list. Not included on this list, for instance, are most professional activities.

Non-agricultural Workers' Cooperatives

A worker cooperative is a form of non-state ownership. Formally, the workers in the enterprise own it and receive the income derived from the enterprise. This arrangement has long existed in the agricultural sector in Cuba, as well as other planned-socialist economies, including the Soviet Union. While an alternative to a state-owned farm, the practical distinction between these two forms of ownership in agriculture was minimal. The cooperative, just like the state farm, was required to deliver most, if not all, its output to the state at state-administered prices. It received all its inputs from state suppliers. And it did not own land or capital, all of which was owned by the state.

The concept of workers' cooperatives has been extended to non-agricultural occupations as an alternative to the traditional state-owned enterprise. The idea is to expand the non-state sector and take a burden off the state budget but to preserve some aspect of socialist production. Hundreds of small to medium state enterprises have simply been handed off to their workers as worker cooperatives. I have already mentioned that cafeterias in some state enterprises have been converted into cooperatives that charge for lunches that had been provided free by the state enterprise. Cooperatives can also be formed by private individuals.

Preliminary research on cooperatives finds that those formed by individuals perform much better, on average, than those formed from state enterprises. This is probably unsurprising. Those formed by individuals are probably indistinguishable from what we would call a partnership. These are persons getting together to form a business and sharing in the profits. On the other hand, think about workers in a state enterprise that gets converted into a cooperative. One day the workers are working for the state; the next day they are supposed to be working for themselves. Nothing has really changed except that they can no longer get state subsidies. If the enterprise was unproductive before the change of legal status, it will continue to be unproductive after the change

Prospects for the Future

With all these reforms, especially those that represent a retreat from the promises of socialism, one might wonder if Cuba is still socialist or, if it is, if it will be for long. Employment is no longer a state guarantee. Is guaranteed employment - economic security - not a fundamental promise of socialism? Social services, including health care and education, are being cut. The monthly ration, already woefully inadequate, is being cut. Is it not fundamental to socialism that the state provides, at least the basics? The private sector is being expanded, which, of course, means resource allocation being determined by price signals and motivation by profit. Are not market allocation and profit seeking not anathema to socialist ideology? Thus, will these reforms save or ultimately destroy socialism in Cuba?

Is Cuba in a transition from planned socialism to capitalism? The regime says it is not, that socialism will be forever in Cuba. Of course, that is what the Soviet regime under Gorbachev said during perestroika and look what happened there. We will see.

How will we know that what is happening in Cuba really is transition, despite the regime's current assertions that Cuba will always be socialist? Recall the basic characteristics of a planned-socialist economy. First, non-labor factors are state owned. Transition therefore requires that the state divest itself of its non-labor factors, land and capital. Is Cuba doing that? To some extent, though much of it appears to be in the form of converting state-owned enterprises into cooperatives, much like state farms were converted into cooperatives, without anything of real substance coming from it. What is not happening is the outright privatization of state-owned enterprises. Doesn't look much like transition to me.

Second, planned economies have highly centralized decision-making and information structures while capitalist economies have highly decentralized structures. There has clearly been some decentralization with enterprises, both state owned and cooperatives, having much more decision-making authority than they did prior to the Special Period. There is also the private sector, which has grown substantially over the past few years. These are accommodations to the reality that Cuba must operate in a capitalist world, which requires flexibility and the ability to respond to opportunities as they arise. It is also an accommodation to the reality that the state does not have the resources to support as many state enterprises as in the past. The communist party still has a monopoly over the political process and the economy is still, for the most part, planned. I don't see evidence of transition in the decentralization of the decision-making and information structures. At least not yet.

Third, socialist economies make much greater use of moral incentives and less use of material incentives than do capitalist economies (though all economies depend primarily on material incentives unless they are attempting some sort of "great leap," as occurred in China and Cuba in the past). I don't think there has been much change here, either. The rhetoric is still revolutionary. Revolutionary exhortations are everywhere. The school children still participate in the Young Pioneers, a mass organization of all school-age children (you can see what level Pioneers they are by the color of the scarves worn as part of their school uniform). No transition here.

Finally, planned economies are coordinated by the plan, capitalist economies by markets. There is clearly less planning and more market coordination today than in the past. But the market is relegated to lower-level, mostly service or agricultural (that is, low-priority), activities (like this street vendor).

Cuba is not now a transition economy. It will be when the regime says it is and commits to privatization and much more fundamental decentralization, ceases its revolutionary rhetoric, and dismantles its planning apparatus. We will see.

If Cuba is not in transition to capitalism, what are its prospects as a socialist economy? I do not have a crystal ball but it is hard to see how the planned-socialist economic system there is sustainable. It has not been sustained anywhere except Cuba and North Korea, neither of which are thriving economies. It was not even sustained in the Soviet Union, which was probably the resource-richest country in the World. For much of Cuba's socialist history, its economy was propped up by the Soviet Union. Venezuela took over that role after the collapse of the Soviet Union but now Venezuela appears to be in a state of collapse and there is no replacement in sight. The various reforms described here have failed to reenergize the economy. Furthermore, in what appears to be yet another reversal of course, on August 2, 2017, Raúl Castro announced a freeze on the issuance of new self-employment licenses until the self-employment sector can be "perfected" with new regulations. One suspects that these new regulations will not make it any easier to do business in Cuba.

Finally, what is the impact of the U.S. embargo (what the Cubans call el bloqueo, the blockade)? There is no question that the embargo hurts the Cuban economy (as well as our own). The embargo outlaws all imports from Cuba (with the exception of items licensed travelers bring back for their personal consumption) and all exports to Cuba with the exception of food and medicine and household items that Cuban-Americans take to Cuba on family visits.

It is a basic principle of economics that free trade is beneficial to any economy and the embargo is a severe barrier to trade. However, it only restricts trade between Cuba and the U.S. Cuba can and does trade with other countries, so the impact of the embargo is limited. Much more important is what Cubans call el auto-bloqueo, the internal embargo, which is the system itself. According to Ted Henken and Archibald Ritter, two long-term observers of the Cuban economy, "While we believe that it is both good and necessary for the United States to open up to Cuba and vice versa..., little economic progress or political freedom will be enjoyed by Cubans themselves until the Cuban government opens up to its own people, ceases to demand their acquiescence as subjects, and begins to respect them as citizens, consumers, and entrepreneurs with defensible and inalienable economic and political rights of their own. (Henken and Ritter, 2015)"

Before closing, let me recommend two books on the Cuban economic and political scene, one by Ritter and Henken (2015): Entrepreneurial Cuba: The Changing Policy Landscape. The other is Marc Frank (2013) Cuban Revelations: Behind the Scenes in Havana. Another excellent source of information and analysis on the Cuban economic and political scene is the of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy annual conference proceedings.

And for a fun read, and having nothing to do with the Cuban economy, is Aran Shetterly (2007), The Americano: Fighting with Castro for Cuba's Freedom, about William Morgan, the only American commandante (the highest rank in the revolutionary army)

Enjoy!

References

Frank, Marc, Cuban Revelations: Behind the Scenes in Havana, University Press of Florida, 2013.

Henken, Ted A. and Archibald R.M., "Perspective: Overcoming Cuba's Internal Embargo" in The Cuban Economy Blog.

Mesa-Lago, Carmelo, The Economy of Socialist Cuba: A Two-Decade Appraisal. University of New Mexico Press, 1981.

Mesa-Lago, Carmelo, Market, Socialist, and Mixed Economies: Comparative Policy and Performance - Chile, Cuba, and Costa Rica. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Mesa-Lago, Carmelo, "Panorama de las Reformas Económico-Sociales y sus Effectos en Cuba," Annual Proceedings of the ASCE Conference, 2013.

Ritter, Archibald R.M. and Ted A. Henken. Entrepreneurial Cuba: The Changing

Policy Landscape. Boulder, CO: FirstForumPress/Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2015.

Shetterly, Aran, The Americano: Fighting with Castro for Cuba's Freedom, Algonquin Books, 2007

Ward, Marianne and John Devereux, "The Road Not Taken: Pre-Revolutionary Cuban Living Standards in Comparative Perspective," The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 72, No. 1 (2012).

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William N. Trumbull, PhD Dean and Robert A. Jolley Chair The Citadel Tommy and Victoria Baker School of Business To understand the Cuban economy, we have to know the type of economic system that Cuba implemented under Fidel (and now Raúl) Castro. That system is quite unlike the capitalist system that we are used to [...]

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South China Sea: Chinese military readies for drills near Vietnam coast

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trump retweets russian propaganda about biden that us intel agencies say is intended to influence 2020 election  - cnnpolitics

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Trump retweets Russian propaganda about Biden that US intel agencies say is intended to influence 2020 election

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President Donald Trump on Sunday night retweeted Russian propaganda about former Vice President Joe Biden that the US intelligence community recently announced was part of Moscow's ongoing effort to "denigrate" the Democrat ahead of November's election.

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How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election

Illustration: Mishko; Hanna Alandi / Getty

Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020.
One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked "Like" on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook's algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like "In Trump We Trust." I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.
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The president's reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans' understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.

The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president's conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video-served up by the Trump campaign-that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?

As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: "That's right, the whistleblower's own lawyer said, 'The coup has started ...' " Swipe. "Democrats are doing Putin's bidding ..." Swipe. "The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing ..." Swipe. "Only one man can stop this chaos ..." Swipe, swipe, swipe.

I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I'd assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn't that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself-about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else-felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.

What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes-jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.

After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world's demagogues and strongmen in power.
Read: What, exactly, were Russians trying to do with those Facebook ads?
Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this year's contest promises to be different. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view-one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous.

The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.

THE DEATH STAR

The campaign is run from the 14th floor of a gleaming, modern office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Glass-walled conference rooms look out on the Potomac River. Rows of sleek monitors line the main office space. Unlike the bootstrap operation that first got Trump elected-with its motley band of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Tower- his 2020 enterprise is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. One Republican strategist referred to it, admiringly, as "the Death Star."

Presiding over this effort is Brad Parscale, a 6-foot-8 Viking of a man with a shaved head and a triangular beard. As the digital director of Trump's 2016 campaign, Parscale didn't become a household name like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. But he played a crucial role in delivering Trump to the Oval Office-and his efforts will shape this year's election.

In speeches and interviews, Parscale likes to tell his life story as a tidy rags-to-riches tale, embroidered with Trumpian embellishments. He grew up a simple "farm boy from Kansas" (read: son of an affluent lawyer from suburban Topeka) who managed to graduate from an "Ivy League" school (Trinity University, in San Antonio). After college, he went to work for a software company in California, only to watch the business collapse in the economic aftermath of 9/11 (not to mention allegations in a lawsuit that he and his parents, who owned the business, had illegally transferred company funds-claims that they disputed). Broke and desperate, Parscale took his "last $500" (not counting the value of three rental properties he owned) and used it to start a one-man web-design business in Texas.

Parscale Media was, by most accounts, a scrappy endeavor at the outset. Hustling to drum up clients, Parscale cold-pitched shoppers in the tech aisle of a Borders bookstore. Over time, he built enough websites for plumbers and gun shops that bigger clients took notice-including the Trump Organization. In 2011, Parscale was invited to bid on designing a website for Trump International Realty. An ardent fan of The Apprentice, he offered to do the job for $10,000, a fraction of the actual cost. "I just made up a price," he later told The Washington Post. "I recognized that I was a nobody in San Antonio, but working for the Trumps would be everything." The contract was his, and a lucrative relationship was born.

Over the next four years, he was hired to design websites for a range of Trump ventures-a winery, a skin-care line, and then a presidential campaign. By late 2015, Parscale-a man with no discernible politics, let alone campaign experience-was running the Republican front-runner's digital operation from his personal laptop.

Parscale slid comfortably into Trump's orbit. Not only was he cheap and unpretentious-with no hint of the savvier-than-thou smugness that characterized other political operatives-but he seemed to carry a chip on his shoulder that matched the candidate's. "Brad was one of those people who wanted to prove the establishment wrong and show the world what he was made of," says a former colleague from the campaign.

Perhaps most important, he seemed to have no reservations about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending-none of it seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their hands over Trump's inflammatory messages, Parscale came up with ideas to more effectively disseminate them.
Read: Bots are destroying political discourse as we know it
The campaign had little interest at first in cutting-edge ad technology, and for a while, Parscale's most valued contribution was the merchandise page he built to sell MAGA hats. But that changed in the general election. Outgunned on the airwaves and lagging badly in fundraising, campaign officials turned to Google and Facebook, where ads were inexpensive and shock value was rewarded. As the campaign poured tens of millions into online advertising-amplifying themes such as Hillary Clinton's criminality and the threat of radical Islamic terrorism-Parscale's team, which was christened Project Alamo, grew to 100.

Parscale was generally well liked by his colleagues, who recall him as competent and intensely focused. "He was a get-shit-done type of person," says A. J. Delgado, who worked with him. Perhaps just as important, he had a talent for ingratiating himself with the Trump family. "He was probably better at managing up," Kurt Luidhardt, a consultant for the campaign, told me. He made sure to share credit for his work with the candidate's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and he excelled at using Trump's digital ignorance to flatter him. "Parscale would come in and tell Trump he didn't need to listen to the polls, because he'd crunched his data and they were going to win by six points," one former campaign staffer told me. "I was like, 'Come on, man, don't bullshit a bullshitter.' " But Trump seemed to buy it. (Parscale declined to be interviewed for this story.)

David A. Graham: The real problem with fake news
James Barnes, a Facebook employee who was dispatched to work closely with the campaign, told me Parscale's political inexperience made him open to experimenting with the platform's new tools. "Whereas some grizzled campaign strategist who'd been around the block a few times might say, 'Oh, that will never work,' Brad's predisposition was to say, 'Yeah, let's try it.' " From June to November, Trump's campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, while Clinton's ran just 66,000. A Facebook executive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump " got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser."

Though some strategists questioned how much these ads actually mattered, Parscale was hailed for Trump's surprise victory. Stories appeared in the press calling him a "genius" and the campaign's "secret weapon," and in 2018 he was tapped to lead the entire reelection effort. The promotion was widely viewed as a sign that the president's 2020 strategy would hinge on the digital tactics that Parscale had mastered.
Read: What Facebook did to American democracy
Through it all, the strategist has continued to show a preference for narrative over truth. Last May, Parscale regaled a crowd of donors and activists in Miami with the story of his ascent. When a ProPublica reporter confronted him about the many misleading details in his account, he shrugged off the fact-check. "When I give a speech, I tell it like a story," he said. "My story is my story."

DISINFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

In his book This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev, a researcher at the London School of Economics, writes about a young Filipino political consultant he calls "P." In college, P had studied the "Little Albert experiment," in which scientists conditioned a young child to fear furry animals by exposing him to loud noises every time he encountered a white lab rat. The experiment gave P an idea. He created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the groups got big enough-about 100,000 members-he began posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes.

Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot presidential candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals. ( Duterte once boasted that, as mayor of Davao City, he rode through the streets on his motorcycle and personally executed drug dealers.) P's experiment was one plank in a larger "disinformation architecture"-which also included social-media influencers paid to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls working out of former call centers-that experts say aided Duterte's rise to power. Since assuming office in 2016, Duterte has reportedly ramped up these efforts while presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings.

The campaign in the Philippines was emblematic of an emerging propaganda playbook, one that uses new tools for the age-old ends of autocracy. The Kremlin has long been an innovator in this area. (A 2011 manual for Russian civil servants favorably compared their methods of disinformation to "an invisible radiation" that takes effect while "the population doesn't even feel it is being acted upon.") But with the technological advances of the past decade, and the global proliferation of smartphones, governments around the world have found success deploying Kremlin-honed techniques against their own people.
Read: Peter Pomerantsev on Russia and the menace of unreality
In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. They may use gentler terminology- muddy the waters; alternative facts -but they're building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.

Central to that effort is the campaign's use of micro-targeting-the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages. The advantages of this approach are obvious: An ad that calls for defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to 800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its reception will be much more positive. If candidates once had to shout their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear.

Parscale didn't invent this practice-Barack Obama's campaign famously used it in 2012, and Clinton's followed suit. But Trump's effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and its brazenness. In the final days of the 2016 race, for example, Trump's team tried to suppress turnout among black voters in Florida by slipping ads into their News Feeds that read, "Hillary Thinks African-Americans Are Super Predators." An unnamed campaign official boasted to Bloomberg Businessweek that it was one of " three major voter suppression operations underway." (The other two targeted young women and white liberals.)

The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.

The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sources-without users' consent-Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed "psychographic profiles" for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain personality traits. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: "Did you feel like you had to say that?"

Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that "with the right kind of nudges," people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. "Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that," Wylie said. "We were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States."

Cambridge Analytica was dissolved in 2018, shortly after its CEO was caught on tape bragging about using bribery and sexual "honey traps" on behalf of clients. (The firm denied that it actually used such tactics.) Since then, some political scientists have questioned how much effect its "psychographic" targeting really had. But Wylie-who spoke with me from London, where he now works for H&M, as a fashion-trend forecaster-said the firm's work in 2016 was a modest test run compared with what could come.

"What happens if North Korea or Iran picks up where Cambridge Analytica left off?" he said, noting that plenty of foreign actors will be looking for ways to interfere in this year's election. "There are countless hostile states that have more than enough capacity to quickly replicate what we were able to do ... and make it much more sophisticated." These efforts may not come only from abroad: A group of former Cambridge Analytica employees have formed a new firm that, according to the Associated Press, is working with the Trump campaign. (The firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.)

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook was excoriated for its mishandling of user data and complicity in the viral spread of fake news. Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better, and rolled out a flurry of reforms. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. (Commercial advertisers, by contrast, are subject to fact-checking.) In a speech at Georgetown University, the CEO argued that his company shouldn't be responsible for arbitrating political speech, and that because political ads already receive so much scrutiny, candidates who choose to lie will be held accountable by journalists and watchdogs.

To bolster his case, Zuckerberg pointed to the recently launched-and publicly accessible- "library" where Facebook archives every political ad it publishes. The project has a certain democratic appeal: Why censor false or toxic content when a little sunlight can have the same effect? But spend some time scrolling through the archive of Trump reelection ads, and you quickly see the limits of this transparency.

Read: The age of reverse censorship
The campaign doesn't run just one ad at a time on a given theme. It runs hundreds of iterations-adjusting the language, the music, even the colors of the "Donate" buttons. In the 10 weeks after the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, the Trump campaign ran roughly 14,000 different ads containing the word impeachment. Sifting through all of them is virtually impossible.

Both parties will rely on micro-targeted ads this year, but the president is likely to have a distinct advantage. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel.

While these ads can be used to try to win over undecided voters, they're most often deployed for fundraising and for firing up the faithful-and Trump's advisers believe this election will be decided by mobilization, not persuasion. To turn out the base, the campaign has signaled that it will return to familiar themes: the threat of "illegal aliens"- a term Parscale has reportedly encouraged Trump to use -and the corruption of the "swamp."

Beyond Facebook, the campaign is also investing in a texting platform that could allow it to send anonymous messages directly to millions of voters' phones without their permission. Until recently, people had to opt in before a campaign could include them in a mass text. But with new "peer to peer" texting apps-including one developed by Gary Coby, a senior Trump adviser- a single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, skirting federal regulations by clicking "Send" one message at a time. Notably, these messages aren't required to disclose who's behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text.

Most experts assume that these regulations will be overhauled sometime after the 2020 election. For now, campaigns from both parties are hoovering up as many cellphone numbers as possible, and Parscale has said texting will be at the center of Trump's reelection strategy. The medium's ability to reach voters is unparalleled: While robocalls get sent to voicemail and email blasts get trapped in spam folders, peer-to-peer texting companies say that at least 90 percent of their messages are opened.

The Trump campaign's texts so far this cycle have focused on shouty fundraising pleas ("They have NOTHING! IMPEACHMENT IS OVER! Now let's CRUSH our End of Month Goal"). But the potential for misuse by outside groups is clear-and shady political actors are already discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text.

In 2018, as early voting got under way in Tennessee's Republican gubernatorial primary, voters began receiving text messages attacking two of the candidates' conservative credentials. The texts-written in a conversational style, as if they'd been sent from a friend-were unsigned, and people who tried calling the numbers received a busy signal. The local press covered the smear campaign. Law enforcement was notified. But the source of the texts was never discovered.

WAR ON THE PRESS

One afternoon last March, I was on the phone with a Republican operative close to the Trump family when he casually mentioned that a reporter at Business Insider was about to have a very bad day. The journalist, John Haltiwanger, had tweeted something that annoyed Donald Trump Jr., prompting the coterie of friends and allies surrounding the president's son to drum up a hit piece. The story they had coming, the operative suggested to me, would demolish the reporter's credibility.

I wasn't sure what to make of this gloating-people in Trump's circle have a tendency toward bluster. But a few hours later, the operative sent me a link to a Breitbart News article documenting Haltiwanger's "history of intense Trump hatred." The story was based on a series of Instagram posts-all of them from before Haltiwanger started working at Business Insider -in which he made fun of the president and expressed solidarity with liberal protesters.

The next morning, Don Jr. tweeted the story to his 3 million followers, denouncing Haltiwanger as a "raging lib." Other conservatives piled on, and the reporter was bombarded with abusive messages and calls for him to be fired. His employer issued a statement conceding that the Instagram posts were "not appropriate." Haltiwanger kept his job, but the experience, he told me later, "was bizarre and unsettling."

The Breitbart story was part of a coordinated effort by a coalition of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage of the president. ( The New York Times first reported on this project last summer; since then, it's been described to me in greater detail.) According to people with knowledge of the effort, pro-Trump operatives have scraped social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists and compiled years' worth of posts into a dossier.

Often when a particular news story is deemed especially unfair-or politically damaging-to the president, Don Jr. will flag it in a text thread that he uses for this purpose. (Among those who text regularly with the president's eldest son, someone close to him told me, are the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; two GOP strategists, Sergio Gor and Arthur Schwartz; Matthew Boyle, a Breitbart editor; and U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell.) Once a story has been marked for attack, someone searches the dossier for material on the journalists involved. If something useful turns up-a problematic old joke; evidence of liberal political views-Boyle turns it into a Breitbart headline, which White House officials and campaign surrogates can then share on social media. (The White House has denied any involvement in this effort.)

Descriptions of the dossier vary. One source I spoke with said that a programmer in India had been paid to organize it into a searchable database, making posts that contain offensive keywords easier to find. Another told me the dossier had expanded to at least 2,000 people, including not just journalists but high-profile academics, politicians, celebrities, and other potential Trump foes. Some of this, of course, may be hyperbolic boasting-but the effort has yielded fruit.

In the past year, the operatives involved have gone after journalists at CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. They exposed one reporter for using the word fag in college, and another for posting anti-Semitic and racist jokes a decade ago. These may not have been career-ending revelations, but people close to the project said they're planning to unleash much more opposition research as the campaign intensifies. "This is innovative shit," said Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist with a history of trolling. "They're appropriating call-out culture."

What's notable about this effort is not that it aims to expose media bias. Conservatives have been complaining-with some merit-about a liberal slant in the press for decades. But in the Trump era, an important shift has taken place. Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, today's most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether. "Journalistic integrity is dead," Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. "There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information."

It's a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content-no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump's assault on the press, and the more "enemies of the people" his allies can take out along the way, the better. " A culture war is a war," Steve Bannon told the Times last year. "There are casualties in war."

This attitude has permeated the president's base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media-while 91 percent turn to the president for "accurate information." This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. "Remember," he told a crowd in 2018, " what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."

Bryan Lanza, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016 and remains a White House surrogate, told me flatly that he sees no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from which to conduct the big debates of this year's election. Nor is that his goal. "It's our job to sell our narrative louder than the media," Lanza said. "They're clearly advocating for a liberal-socialist position, and we're never going to be in concert. So the war continues."

From December 2019: The dark psychology of social networks
Parscale has indicated that he plans to open up a new front in this war: local news. Last year, he said the campaign intends to train "swarms of surrogates" to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers. Polls have long found that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more than national media. If the campaign has its way, that trust will be eroded by November. "We can actually build up and fight with the local newspapers," Parscale told donors, according to a recording provided by The Palm Beach Post. "So we're not just fighting on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC with the same 700,000 people watching every day."

Running parallel to this effort, some conservatives have been experimenting with a scheme to exploit the credibility of local journalism. Over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names like the Arizona Monitor and The Kalamazoo Times have begun popping up. At first glance, they look like regular publications, complete with community notices and coverage of schools. But look closer and you'll find that there are often no mastheads, few if any bylines, and no addresses for local offices. Many of them are organs of Republican lobbying groups; others belong to a mysterious company called Locality Labs, which is run by a conservative activist in Illinois. Readers are given no indication that these sites have political agendas-which is precisely what makes them valuable.

According to one longtime strategist, candidates looking to plant a negative story about an opponent can pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these Potemkin news sites. By working through a third-party consulting firm-instead of paying the sites directly-candidates are able to obscure their involvement in the scheme when they file expenditures to the Federal Election Commission. Even if the stories don't fool savvy readers, the headlines are convincing enough to be flashed across the screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fundraising emails.

DIGITAL DIRTY TRICKS

Shortly after polls closed in Kentucky's gubernatorial election last November, an anonymous Twitter user named @Overlordkraken1 announced to his 19 followers that he had "just shredded a box of Republican mail in ballots" in Louisville.

There was little reason to take this claim at face value, and plenty of reason to doubt it (beginning with the fact that he'd misspelled Louisville). But the race was tight, and as incumbent Governor Matt Bevin began to fall behind in the vote total, an army of Twitter bots began spreading the election-rigging claim.

The original post was removed by Twitter, but by then thousands of automated accounts were circulating screenshots of it with the hashtag #StoptheSteal. Popular right-wing internet personalities jumped on the narrative, and soon the Bevin campaign was making noise about unspecified voting "irregularities." When the race was called for his opponent, the governor refused to concede, and asked for a statewide review of the vote. (No evidence of ballot-shredding was found, and he finally admitted defeat nine days later.)

The Election Night disinformation blitz had all the markings of a foreign influence operation. In 2016, Russian trolls had worked in similar ways to contaminate U.S. political discourse- posing as Black Lives Matter activists in an attempt to inflame racial divisions, and fanning pro-Trump conspiracy theories. (They even used Facebook to organize rallies, including one for Muslim supporters of Clinton in Washington, D.C., where they got someone to hold up a sign attributing a fictional quote to the candidate: "I think Sharia law will be a powerful new direction of freedom.")

But when Twitter employees later reviewed the activity surrounding Kentucky's election, they concluded that the bots were largely based in America -a sign that political operatives here were learning to mimic Russian trolling tactics.

Of course, dirty tricks aren't new to American politics. From Lee Atwater and Roger Stone to the crooked machine Democrats of Chicago, the country has a long history of underhanded operatives smearing opponents and meddling in elections. And, in fact, Samuel Woolley, a scholar who studies digital propaganda, told me that the first documented deployment of politicized Twitter bots was in the U.S. In 2010, an Iowa-based conservative group set up a small network of automated accounts with names like @BrianD82 to promote the idea that Martha Coakley, a Democrat running for Senate in Massachusetts, was anti-Catholic.

Mishko

Since then, the tactics of Twitter warfare have grown more sophisticated, as regimes around the world experiment with new ways to deploy their cybermilitias. In Mexico, supporters of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto created "sock puppet" accounts to pose as protesters and sabotage the opposition movement. In Azerbaijan, a pro-government youth group waged coordinated harassment campaigns against journalists, flooding their Twitter feeds with graphic threats and insults. When these techniques prove successful, Woolley told me, Americans improve upon them. "It's almost as if there's a Columbian exchange between developing-world authoritarian regimes and the West," he said.

Parscale has denied that the campaign uses bots, saying in a 60 Minutes interview, "I don't think [they] work." He may be right-it's unlikely that these nebulous networks of trolls and bots could swing a national election. But they do have their uses. They can simulate false consensus, derail sincere debate, and hound people out of the public square.

According to one study, bots accounted for roughly 20 percent of all the tweets posted about the 2016 election during one five-week period that year. And Twitter is already infested with bots that seem designed to boost Trump's reelection prospects. Regardless of where they're coming from, they have tremendous potential to divide, radicalize, and stoke hatred that lasts long after the votes are cast.

Rob Flaherty, who served as the digital director for Beto O'Rourke's presidential campaign, told me that Twitter in 2020 is a "hall of mirrors." He said one mysterious account started a viral rumor that the gunman who killed seven people in Odessa, Texas, last summer had a beto bumper sticker on his car. Another masqueraded as an O'Rourke supporter and hurled racist invective at a journalist. Some of these tactics echoed 2016, when Russian agitators posed as Bernie Sanders supporters and stirred up anger toward Hillary Clinton.

Flaherty said he didn't know who was behind the efforts targeting O'Rourke, and the candidate dropped out before they could make a real difference. "But you can't watch this landscape and not get the feeling that someone's fucking with something," he told me. Flaherty has since joined Joe Biden's campaign, which has had to contend with similar distortions: Last year, a website resembling an official Biden campaign page appeared on the internet. It emphasized elements of the candidate's legislative record likely to hurt him in the Democratic primary-opposition to same-sex marriage, support for the Iraq War-and featured video clips of his awkward encounters with women. The site quickly became one of the most-visited Biden-related sites on the web. It was designed by a Trump consultant.

FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE

As the president's reelection machine ramps up, Democratic strategists have found themselves debating an urgent question: Can they defeat the Trump coalition without adopting its tactics?

On one side of this argument is Dmitri Mehlhorn, a consultant notorious for his willingness to experiment with digital subterfuge. During Alabama's special election in 2017, Mehlhorn helped fund at least two "false flag" operations against the Republican Senate candidate, Roy Moore. For one scheme, faux Russian Twitter bots followed the candidate's account to make it look like the Kremlin was backing Moore. For another, a fake social-media campaign, dubbed "Dry Alabama," was designed to link Moore to fictional Baptist teetotalers trying to ban alcohol. (Mehlhorn has claimed that he is unaware of the Russian bot effortand does not support the use of misinformation.)

When The New York Times uncovered the second plot, one of the activists involved, Matt Osborne, contended that Democrats had no choice but to employ such unscrupulous techniques. "If you don't do it, you're fighting with one hand tied behind your back," Osborne said. "You have a moral imperative to do this-to do whatever it takes."

Others have argued that this is precisely the wrong moment for Democrats to start abandoning ideals of honesty and fairness. "It's just not in my values to go out there making shit up and tricking voters," Flaherty told me. "I know there's this whole fight-fire-with-fire contingent, but generally when you ask them what they mean, they're like, 'Lie!' " Some also note that the president has already handed them plenty of ammunition. "I don't think the Democratic campaign is going to need to make stuff up about Trump," Judd Legum, the author of a progressive newsletter about digital politics, told me. "They can stick to things that are true."

One Democrat straddling these two camps is a young, tech-savvy strategist named Tara McGowan. Last fall, she and the former Obama adviser David Plouffe launched a political-action committee with a pledge to spend $75 million attacking Trump online. At the time, the president's campaign was running more ads on Facebook and Google than the top four Democratic candidates combined. McGowan's plans to return fire included such ads, but she also had more creative-and controversial-measures in mind.

For example, she established a media organization with a staff of writers to produce left-leaning "hometown news" stories that can be micro-targeted to persuadable voters on Facebook without any indication that they're paid for by a political group. Though she insists that the reporting is strictly factual, some see the enterprise as a too-close-for-comfort co-opting of right-wing tactics.

When I spoke with McGowan, she was open about her willingness to push boundaries that might make some Democrats queasy. As far as she was concerned, the "super-predator" ads Trump ran to depress black turnout in 2016 were "fair game" because they had some basis in fact. (Clinton did use the term in 1996, to refer to gang members.) McGowan suggested that a similar approach could be taken with conservatives. She ruled out attempts to misinform Republicans about when and where to vote -a tactic Mehlhorn reportedly considered, though he later said he was joking-but said she would pursue any strategy that was "in the bounds of the law."

"We are in a radically disruptive moment right now," McGowan told me. "We have a president that lies every day, unabashedly ... I think Trump is so desperate to win this election that he will do anything. There will be no bar too low for him."

This intraparty split was highlighted last year when state officials urged the Democratic National Committee to formally disavow the use of bots, troll farms, and "deepfakes" (digitally manipulated videos that can, with alarming precision, make a person appear to do or say anything). Supporters saw the proposed pledge as a way of contrasting their party's values with those of the GOP. But after months of lobbying, the committee refused to adopt the pledge.
From May 2018: The era of fake video begins
Meanwhile, experts worried about domestic disinformation are looking to other countries for lessons. The most successful recent example may be Indonesia, which cracked down on the problem after a wave of viral lies and conspiracy theories pushed by hard-line Islamists led to the defeat of a popular Christian Chinese candidate for governor in 2016. To prevent a similar disruption in last year's presidential election, a coalition of journalists from more than two dozen top Indonesian news outlets worked together to identify and debunk hoaxes before they gained traction online. But while that may sound like a promising model, it was paired with aggressive efforts by the state to monitor and arrest purveyors of fake news-an approach that would run afoul of the First Amendment if attempted in the U.S.

Richard Stengel, who served as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy under President Obama, spent almost three years trying to counter digital propaganda from the Islamic State and Russia. By the time he left office, he told me, he was convinced that disinformation would continue to thrive until big tech companies were forced to take responsibility for it. Stengel has proposed amending the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from liability for messages posted by third parties. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter, he believes, should be required by law to police their platforms for disinformation and abusive trolling. "It's not going to solve the whole problem," he told me, "but it's going to help with volume."

There is one other case study to consider. During the Ukrainian revolution in 2014, pro-democracy activists found that they could defang much of the false information about their movement by repeatedly exposing its Russian origins. But this kind of transparency comes with a cost, Stengel observed. Over time, alertness to the prevalence of propaganda can curdle into paranoia. Russian operatives have been known to encourage such anxiety by spreading rumors that exaggerate their own influence. Eventually, the fear of covert propaganda inflicts as much damage as the propaganda itself.

Once you internalize the possibility that you're being manipulated by some hidden hand, nothing can be trusted. Every dissenting voice on Twitter becomes a Russian bot, every uncomfortable headline a false flag, every political development part of an ever-deepening conspiracy. By the time the information ecosystem collapses under the weight of all this cynicism, you're too vigilant to notice that the disinformationists have won.

POWERS OF INCUMBENCY

If there's one thing that can be said for Brad Parscale, it's that he runs a tight ship. Unauthorized leaks from inside the campaign are rare; press stories on palace intrigue are virtually nonexistent. When the staff first moved into its new offices last year, journalists were periodically invited to tour the facility-but Parscale put an end to the practice: He didn't want them glimpsing a scrap of paper or a whiteboard scribble that they weren't supposed to see.

Notably, while the Trump White House has endured a seemingly endless procession of shake-ups, the Trump reelection campaign has seen very little turnover since Parscale took charge. His staying power is one reason many Republicans-inside the organization or out-hesitate to talk about him on the record. But among allies of the president, there appears to be a growing skepticism.

Former colleagues began noticing a change in Parscale after his promotion. Suddenly, the quiet guy with his face buried in a laptop was wearing designer suits, tossing out MAGA hats at campaign rallies, and traveling to Europe to speak at a political-marketing conference. In the past few years, Parscale has bought a BMW, a Range Rover, a condo, and a $2.4 million waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "He knows he has the confidence of the family," one former colleague told me, "which gives him more swagger." When the U.K.'s Daily Mail ran a story spotlighting Parscale's spending spree, he attempted deflection through flattery. "The president is an excellent businessman," he told the tabloid, "and being associated with him for years has been extremely beneficial to my family."

But according to a former White House official with knowledge of the incident, Trump was irritated by the coverage, and the impression it created that his campaign manager was getting rich off him. For a moment, Parscale's standing appeared to be in peril, but then Trump's attention was diverted by the G7 summit in France, and he never returned to the issue. (A spokesperson for the campaign disputed this account.)

Some Republicans worry that for all Parscale's digital expertise, he doesn't have the vision to guide Trump to reelection. The president is historically unpopular, and even in red states, he has struggled to mobilize his base for special elections. If Trump's message is growing stale with voters, is Parscale the man to help overhaul it? "People start to ask the question-you're building this apparatus, and that's great, but what's the overarching narrative?" said a former campaign staffer.

But whether Trump finds a new narrative or not, he has something this time around that he didn't have in 2016-the powers of the presidency. While every commander in chief looks for ways to leverage his incumbency for reelection, Trump has shown that he's willing to go much further than most. In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, he seized on reports of a migrant caravan traveling to the U.S. from Central America to claim that the southern border was facing a national-security crisis. Trump warned of a coming "invasion" and claimed, without evidence, that the caravan had been infiltrated by gang members.

Parscale aided this effort by creating a 30-second commercial that interspersed footage of Hispanic migrants with clips of a convicted cop-killer. The ad ended with an urgent call to action: stop the caravan. vote republican. In a final maneuver before the election, Trump dispatched U.S. troops to the border. The president insisted that the operation was necessary to keep America safe-but within weeks the troops were quietly called back, the "crisis" having apparently ended once votes were cast. Skeptics were left to wonder: If Trump is willing to militarize the border to pick up a few extra seats in the midterms, what will he and his supporters do when his reelection is on the line?
Read: McKay Coppins on the conservatives trying to ditch fake news
It doesn't require an overactive imagination to envision a worst-case scenario: On Election Day, anonymous text messages direct voters to the wrong polling locations, or maybe even circulate rumors of security threats. Deepfakes of the Democratic nominee using racial slurs crop up faster than social-media platforms can remove them. As news outlets scramble to correct the inaccuracies, hordes of Twitter bots respond by smearing and threatening reporters. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has spent the final days of the race pumping out Facebook ads at such a high rate that no one can keep track of what they're injecting into the bloodstream.

After the first round of exit polls is released, a mysteriously sourced video surfaces purporting to show undocumented immigrants at the ballot box. Trump begins retweeting rumors of voter fraud and suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should be dispatched to polling stations. are illegals stealing the election? reads the Fox News chyron. are russians behind false videos? demands MSNBC.

The votes haven't even been counted yet, and much of the country is ready to throw out the result.

NOTHING IS TRUE

There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally. One night in November, I navigated through a parking-lot maze of folding tables covered in MAGA merch and entered the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Mississippi. The election was still a year away, but thousands of sign-waving supporters had crowded into the venue to cheer on the president in person.

Once Trump took the stage, he let loose a familiar flurry of lies, half-lies, hyperbole, and nonsense. He spun his revisionist history of the Ukraine scandal-the one in which Joe Biden is the villain-and claimed, falsely, that the Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams wanted to "give illegal aliens the right to vote." At one point, during a riff on abortion, Trump casually asserted that "the governor of Virginia executed a baby"-prompting a woman in the crowd to scream, "Murderer!"

This incendiary fabrication didn't seem to register with my companions in the press pen, who were busy writing stories and shooting B-roll. I opened Twitter, expecting to see a torrent of fact-checks laying out the truth of the case-that the governor had been answering a hypothetical question about late-term abortion; that a national firestorm had ensued; that there were certainly different ways to interpret his comments but that not even the most ardent anti-abortion activist thought the governor of Virginia had personally "executed a baby."

But Twitter was uncharacteristically quiet (apparently the president had said this before), and the most widely shared tweet I found on the subject was from his own campaign, which had blasted out a context-free clip of the governor's abortion comments to back up Trump's smear.

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After the rally, I loitered near one of the exits, chatting with people as they filed out of the arena. Among liberals, there is a comforting caricature of Trump supporters as gullible personality cultists who have been hypnotized into believing whatever their leader says. The appeal of this theory is the implication that the spell can be broken, that truth can still triumph over lies, that someday everything could go back to normal- if only these voters were exposed to the facts. But the people I spoke with in Tupelo seemed to treat matters of fact as beside the point.

One woman told me that, given the president's accomplishments, she didn't care if he "fabricates a little bit." A man responded to my questions about Trump's dishonest attacks on the press with a shrug and a suggestion that the media "ought to try telling the truth once in a while." Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. "He tells you what you want to hear," Willnow said. "And I don't know if it's true or not-but it sounds good, so fuck it."

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers "a mixture of gullibility and cynicism." When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they'd known all along-and would then "admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness." Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to "believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true."
This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline "The 2020 Disinformation War."
Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election's legacy will be clear-not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.

McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party.

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The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President

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How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020. One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked "Like" on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign.

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In North Korea, all authority flows from Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. He has reinstated the party as the central hub to consolidate his power and bring elites to heel.

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https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/10/china-xi-jinping-totalitarian-authoritarian-debate/

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This year, H&M disappeared from China's internet. Ride hailing, e-commerce, online promotions: The world's largest fashion retailer simply vanished without a trace. Its stores were still open for business-if you could find them. They suffered no broken windows or tax raids, but China's own Baidu Maps and even Apple Maps literally wiped them, well, off the map.

That might seem like a small price to pay for taking a principled stand against modern slavery. But the precision of China's strike on H&M is just as shocking as its smothering completeness. It demonstrates that the government exercises a form of power in China that is as fine-tuned as it is total. Whether it's lashing out at a corporate critic, silencing all warnings of an emerging infectious disease, or suppressing the language and religion of an entire ethnic group, China's government is no brute-force authoritarian regime. It is the inventor of a new 21st century techno-totalitarianism. It possesses all the tools of classic totalitarianism-and many new ones of its own invention.

H&M's crime-if you can call it that-was to publish a statement last October reassuring its customers that it was "deeply concerned" about "accusations of forced labour" in western China's Xinjiang autonomous region. It neither endorsed the accusations nor condemned China's ongoing crimes against humanity, which many label genocide, although it did confirm it would no longer source cotton from the region. Mysteriously, China's government waited five months to bushwhack H&M for practicing responsible corporate governance.

This kind of arbitrary exercise of power is a key feature distinguishing totalitarian regimes from authoritarian ones. Authoritarian governments base their legitimacy on the authority of key institutions-often religious ones-that are already deeply rooted in their societies. They are able to transgress ordinary moral limits because they leverage the preexisting loyalties and beliefs of their populations. Authoritarian violence is often brutal, but it is rarely surgical.

Totalitarians demand their people give up sentimental attachments to established institutions in favor of an empty ideology of state power. A great theorist on totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, explained that totalitarians teach their followers to "believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true." Totalitarian regimes are entirely unfeeling, committing genocide or scrubbing a company from the internet with equal equanimity. They murder as a simple matter of state policy. To use the chillingly clever aphorism so often attributed to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, "a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." Or as Arendt put it, Hitler's concentration camps made even "death itself anonymous."

The word "totalitarianism" was first used in print in 1926 by Roman Catholic priest Luigi Sturzo to describe then-Italian Prime Minister's Benito Mussolini's fascist government. For Sturzo, totalitarianism represented "the centralization of political and economic life, suppressing all freedom of action and transforming the powers of the state into a single power, both executive and administrative, and thereby reducing it to true dictatorial power." While authoritarian regimes force the individual to submit to a warped and one-sided sliver of society, totalitarianism is the exaltation of the state above everything else, including both the individual and society.

Mussolini's Italy was only ever aspirationally totalitarian, and although it took control of civil society organizations like newspapers and trade unions, it had to come to an accommodation with the powerful Catholic Church. Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms were more complete. They all differed in character, not to mention the sheer scale of their violence, from the murderous authoritarianism of Francisco Franco's Spain, António de Oliveira Salazar's Portugal, and later military regimes in places like Greece, Argentina, and Brazil. Authoritarians consistently appealed to the moral authority of established institutions like the army and the church. Totalitarians based their rule on sheer terror.

Communist China has always been totalitarian in theory and was perhaps totalitarian in practice under Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong in the first quarter century of the People's Republic. As Mao said, "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," and "the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party." The chaotic character of Mao's rule may have prevented the Chinese Communist Party from effectively running the country, but that didn't stop it from infiltrating all aspects of-what in an ordinary country would be called-civil society. In China, even the Catholic churches are run by the state.

In the early years of Mao's rule, Western authors routinely described China as a totalitarian state. But that began to trail off around the time of then-U.S. President Richard Nixon's 1972 thaw. As late as 1978, the influential Freedom House "Freedom in the World" report maintained that "Communist China remains one of the most totalitarian states in the world." With the opening of China's reform era in 1979, that language was dropped. But after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, many commentators must have felt the need for some kind of political epithet to describe China. Most of them seem to have settled on "authoritarian."

Like many others, Freedom House now describes China as having an "authoritarian regime." But China has little in common with classic authoritarian states. China's Communist Party does not seek to legitimate its rule by reference to the authority of any established institutions beyond generic appeals to Chinese patriotism and Confucian patrimonialism. Yet under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the "centralization of political and economic life" that Sturzo considered the hallmark of totalitarianism has only increased. Those who associate totalitarianism with concentration camps need only look to Xinjiang, where China is using top-down tools of social control to bury a society of many million people in the mass grave of cultural oblivion. If China ever was governed by a totalitarian regime, it is now.

When a state tracks the online communications of its citizens, tracks people physically using facial recognition technologies, controls all mass media and most social media, and imprisons large sections of its population in concentration camps, it is a totalitarian regime-pure and simple. Short of installing Orwellian two-way telescreens in everyone's living rooms-or, in today's terms, proof that it is watching every citizen through their smartphones' cameras-it's hard to see what more China can do to earn the label. The concentration of power in communist China already matches that of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and modern technology gives today's China infinitely more refined mechanisms for monitoring and controlling its population.

There seems to be a strange reluctance to apply the "T-word" to contemporary China. Pundits seem more comfortable asking whether China's government is totalitarian than stating that it is. In addition to Freedom House, nongovernmental organizations like Human Rights Watch, think tanks like the Brookings Institution, and government agencies like the U.S. State Department all characterize China as authoritarian, not totalitarian. They don't seem to have given much thought to what the word "authoritarian" might mean beyond the implication that its spread represents a challenge to liberal democracy. The irony is authoritarianism rarely spreads. History teaches us that totalitarianism usually threatens to spill its borders and endanger the rest of the world.

Truly authoritarian regimes can be extremely unsavory, but their embeddedness in particular social milieux-again, consider Spain, Portugal, or Greece-makes them inherently unexportable. Totalitarian regimes, by contrast, are much more able to enforce external compliance with their demands. That's because they don't require foreign collaborators to agree with their warped norms. They require only compliance-and all too often today, foreign companies and even universities are willing to provide it.

H&M may hold firm to its ethical principles, though that could prove costly for the company-and even for Sweden, its home country. Countless other Western firms have long since given into China's pressure and effectively allowed themselves to slip under China's influence. Unfortunately, there is no way to fight the spread of totalitarianism without harming the bottom line. That truth applies to whole societies as much as to individual companies. The corrupting influence of China's totalitarianism can be contained at the border but only if other countries recognize it for what it is-and don't flinch from saying so.

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Yes, You Can Use the T-Word to Describe China

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This year, H&M disappeared from China's internet. Ride hailing, e-commerce, online promotions: The world's largest fashion retailer simply vanished without a trace. Its stores were still open for business-if you could find them. They suffered no broken windows or tax raids, but China's own Baidu Maps and even Apple Maps literally wiped them, well, off the map.

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Political rights and civil liberties around the world deteriorated to their lowest point in more than a decade in 2017, extending a period characterized by emboldened autocrats, beleaguered democracies, and the United States’ withdrawal from its leadership role in the global struggle for human freed…

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Pew Research Center - U.S. Politics & Policy

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Public trust in government remains low, as it has for much of the 21st century. Only two-in-ten Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (2%) or “most of the time” (19%).