Author Archives: Jasper John MacKay

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Across his nearly fifteen-year-long tenure, Tim Cook transformed Apple’s China relationship from a manufacturing arrangement into something closer to a strategic partnership with the CCP. He flew to Beijing repeatedly to meet senior officials, positioning Apple as a committed long-term partner in China’s technology economy. He deepened manufacturing concentration rather than hedging against it, binding Apple’s production capacity ever more tightly to Foxconn’s Zhengzhou complex and the dense supplier ecosystem surrounding it.
~ Isaac Stone Fish via American Affairs

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We remember the pandemic as a boiling point in the culture wars. The continuous battles over lockdowns, masking, police violence, expertise, conspiracy theories, and the outcome of the 2020 election have never really subsided. But the pandemic also exposed the grotesque unfairness of our economy and society in deeply personal ways, cutting across the red-blue divide.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic

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Americans last focused sustained political attention on the trade deficit in the 1980s. A crisis strikingly similar to today’s—a collapsing industrial base, bipartisan fury in Congress, and a soaring dollar—produced the most consequential episode of international currency coordination in modern history. The Plaza Accord of 1985 and the diplomatic campaign that surrounded it succeeded in rapidly reversing the trade deficit. But the success did not last.
~ Michael Starr via American Affairs

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