People gather outside the George R. Brown Convention Center to protest the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Houston, Friday, May 27, 2022. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
HOUSTON (AP) — With protesters shouting outside, the National Rifle Association began its annual convention in Houston on Friday, three days after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school on the other side of the state, renewing the national debate over gun violence.
Former President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders lined up to speak at the event. Leaders of the gun rights lobbying group planned to “reflect on” — and deflect any blame for — the school shooting in Uvalde. Hundreds of protesters angry about gun violence demonstrated outside, including some holding crosses with photos of the shooting victims.
With the protesters, Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who is challenging Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in the governor’s race, ticked off a list of previous school shootings and called on those attending the convention to “join us to make sure that this no longer happens in this country.”
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“The time to have stopped Uvalde was right after Sandy Hook,” O’Rourke said. “The time for us to have stopped Uvalde was right after Parkland. The time for us to have stopped Uvalde was right after Santa Fe High School. The time for us to stop the next mass shooting in this country is right now, right here, today with every single one of us.”
Some scheduled speakers and performers backed out of the event, including several Texas lawmakers and “American Pie” singer Don McLean, who said “it would be disrespectful” to go ahead with his act after the country’s latest mass shooting. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Friday morning that he had decided not to speak at an event breakfast after “prayerful consideration and discussion with NRA officials.”
The NRA said that people attending the gun show would “reflect on” the Uvalde school shooting, “pray for the victims, recognize our patriotic members and pledge to redouble our commitment to making our schools secure.”
The meeting is the first for the troubled organization since 2019, following a two-year hiatus because of the pandemic. The organization has been trying to regroup following a period of serious legal and financial turmoil that included a failed bankruptcy effort, a class action lawsuit and a fraud investigation by New York’s attorney general. Once among the most powerful political organizations in the country, the NRA has seen its influence wane following a significant drop in political spending.
Larry Miller, 56, from Huntington Beach, California, said he had no problem with the NRA meeting taking place so soon after the Uvalde shooting. He called the shooting “very sad and unfortunate” and said the gunman didn’t “have any respect for the people’s freedoms that we have here in this country.”
“We all share these rights, so to be respectful of other people’s rights is to respect other people’s lives, and I think with that kind of mentality, we should be here,” he said.
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Samuel Thornburg, 43, a maintenance worker for Southwest Airlines in Houston who was attending the NRA meeting, said, “Guns are not evil. It’s the people that are committing the crime that are evil. Our schools need to be more locked. There need to be more guards.”
Inside the convention hall, thousands of people walked around, stopping at booths that featured displays of handguns, rifles, AR-style firearms, knives, clothing and gun racks. Outside, police set up metal barriers at a large park where hundreds of protesters and counterprotesters gathered in front of the downtown convention center.
“Murderers!” some yelled in Spanish. “Shame on you!” others shouted at attendees.
Among the protesters was singer Little Joe, of the popular Tejano band Little Joe y La Familia, who said in the more than 60 years he’s spent touring the world, no other country he’s been to has faced as many mass shootings as the U.S.
“Of course, this is the best country in the world. But what good does it do us if we can’t protect lives, especially of our children?” he said.
Horacio Izaguirre, 18, a high school senior who lives in the Houston suburb of Deer Park, held up a sign that had an expletive next to Abbott’s name.
“Those poor innocent souls did not deserve that,” he said. “I have a brother, I have cousins. I want them to be safe.”
There is precedent for the NRA to gather amid local mourning and controversy. The organization went ahead with a shortened version of its 1999 meeting in Denver roughly a week after the deadly shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. Actor Charlton Heston, the NRA president at that time, told attendees that “horrible acts” shouldn’t become opportunities to limit constitutional rights and he denounced critics for casting NRA members as “villains.”
Country music singer Larry Gatlin, who pulled out of a planned appearance at this year’s convention, said he hoped “the NRA will rethink some of its outdated and ill-thought-out positions.”
“While I agree with most of the positions held by the NRA, I have come to believe that, while background checks would not stop every madman with a gun, it is at the very least a step in the right direction,” Gatlin said.
Country singers Lee Greenwood and Larry Stewart also withdrew, Variety reported.
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White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday that the NRA’s leaders “are contributing to the problem of gun violence and not trying to solve it.” She accused them of representing the interests of gun manufacturers, “who are marketing weapons of war to young adults.”
Most U.S. adults think that mass shootings would occur less often if guns were harder to get and believe schools and other public places have become less safe than they were two decades ago, polling finds.
Many specific measures that would curb access to guns or ammunition also get majority support. A May AP-NORC poll found, for instance, that 51% of U.S. adults favor a nationwide ban on the sale of AR-15 rifles and similar semiautomatic weapons. But the numbers are highly partisan, with 75% percent of Democrats agreeing versus just 27% of Republicans.
In addition to Patrick, two Texas congressmen who had been scheduled speak Friday — U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw — were no longer attending because of what their staffs said were changes in their schedules. Abbott, who was to attend, was to address the convention by prerecorded video instead.
But others were going forward with their appearances, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Trump, who said Wednesday that he would deliver “an important address to America.”
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Though personal firearms are allowed at the convention, the NRA said guns would not be permitted during the session featuring Trump because of Secret Service security protocols.
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Colvin reported from New York. Associated Press writer David A. Lieb contributed from Jefferson City, Missouri.
On April 21, the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China held a press conference to announce updates to the Curriculum Standard for Labor Education in Compulsory Education, which introduces requirements for “caring for and looking after plants and animals”, “keeping 1-2 kinds of small animals “and “providing service work for social organizations such as stray animal shelters”. The World Dog Alliance applauds these measures, calling them a significant step forward for China in the field of animal protection.
Tian Hui-sheng, director of the Chinese Ministry of Education’s Bureau of Teaching Materials, explained that the existing compulsory education curriculum and curriculum standards have not been changed for over 20 years and 10 years, respectively, and that they needed to be updated to better align with evolving public values. The revised curriculum improves its structure and substance. This amendment is the first time that an educational curriculum has included the rescue of stray animals since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. This development has received considerable public support.
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Stray animal shelters are classrooms for life skills development, providing students with the opportunity to care for animals and enhance their knowledge and respect for Mother Nature. The new labor curriculum standards are a milestone for improving China’s education system by recognizing the importance of life skills education. The internationally renowned group “DPG Animal Friendly” commented in an article, “The new labor curriculum standards show that the Chinese government is listening to the growing public concern for animal protection. In the past, China has been criticized for lagging behind in animal protection policies, but this situation has improved dramatically in recent years.”
China’s animal protection policies have recently been making rapid improvements, with two of the country’s most progressive cities – Shenzhen and Zhuhai – legislating a ban on the sale and consumption of dog and cat meat in 2020, making them pilot cities for a future national ban. China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs also announced the removal of dogs from the National Catalogue of Livestock and Poultry Genetic Resources. According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, with the progress of human civilization and public concern for animal protection, dogs are now considered companion animals and are generally not considered livestock in the international arena, so it is not appropriate for China to include them in livestock management policies. These policy changes have received widespread positive attention from several international mainstream media outlets, including CNN, BBC, and Bloomberg.
Shanghai, the city with the largest number of pet owners in China, has recently set up the city’s first “animal health post” to take care of the pets of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. In mid-April, Zhang Xiao-ding, a member of the Shanghai Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), drafted a proposal on setting up the animal health post. The proposal was co-sponsored by 53 municipal CPPCC members. Zhang Xiao-ding explained in her proposal that “pets have become an important member of many families, especially during the pandemic. They assume an important role of emotional support and spiritual comfort”. The animal health post has a number of professional volunteers from veterinary hospitals to care for dogs and cats away from their owners, giving them a stable shelter in times of need. Cameras are installed in the post so that owners in quarantine can see their “furry kids” at any time.
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With the rapid development of China’s economy and society, pets are increasingly being welcomed into people’s households. According to statistics, the number of pet dogs and cats in China now exceeds 100 million, and caring for animals has become a common public desire. Zhao Wan-ping, a deputy to the National People’s Congress and Vice President of the Anhui Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences, has for several years submitted proposals to include animal protection and life skills education in primary and secondary school textbooks, so as to create opportunities for students to take action and provide care for animals. The Ministry of Education’s latest revision of curriculum standards reflects that the voices of the people’s representatives have been taken seriously by the Chinese government.
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Upon learning that the Ministry of Education has included animal rescue in the scope of service work in primary and secondary schools, Zhao Wan-ping said that although animal care is placed only in the labor curriculum, it is still a significant step forward. The decision indicates that Chinese government officials, especially education authorities, have realized that education on animal care and respect for life will have positive impacts on children’s social development and, therefore, it is very important for primary and secondary school students to provide service work for stray animal shelters.
The founder of the World Dog Alliance, Genlin, believes that education should be centred around developing life skills and that the greatest form of education awakens children’s respect for life. He is confident that the Chinese Ministry of Education will continue to incorporate animal protection into the education curriculum in the future, making animal protection a compulsory subject for all students in China, rather than just a part of the labor curriculum.
On May 8, 2021, at the crack of dawn, shreds of mist crept from the chilly fields onto Ziendeweg, a country road south of Amsterdam. The rush hour traffic caused by commuters using the road to bypass jams on the highway had not yet picked up. But another activity was taking place. All along the four-kilometer-long road, small groups of people were carrying bundles of white crosses and quietly beginning to erect them on the roadside. When the sun came up, the first motorists were greeted by an eerie spectacle: 642 crosses marked the precise spots where dozens of animals had been killed by vehicles during the past few years. Each cross displayed the common name of…
DES MOINES, Iowa––Hours after Salvador Ramos used an AR-15 automatic rifle he gave himself as an 18th birthday present to massacre 19 fourth graders and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, the Iowa state house of representatives ratified a bill to create a special January antlerless deer hunting season for AR-15 users.
The 56-34 vote followed unanimous Iowa state senate approval in April 2022.
One might surmise that the Iowa house of representatives rushed to establish the AR-15 deer season, on the last day of the Iowa legislative session, to give AR-15 enthusiasts something to shoot besides school children.
The AR-15, besides being the gun Ramos used to kill 21 people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, after shooting his grandmother in the face, was used…
Climate change is pushing hurricanes to their extremes. In 2018, Hurricane Michael (shown here in this digitally enhanced image) became the first Category 5 hurricane to make landfall on the Florida Panhandle. (Image credit: Roberto Machado Noa/Getty Images)
Humans aren’t just making Earth warmer, they are making the climate chaotic, a stark new study suggests.
The new research, which was posted April 21 to the preprint database arXiv(opens in new tab), draws a broad and general picture of the full potential impact of human activity on the climate. And the picture isn’t pretty.
While the study doesn’t present a complete simulation of a climate model, it does paint a broad sketch of where we’re heading if we don’t curtail climate change and our unchecked use of fossil fuels, according to the study authors, scientists in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Porto in Portugal. .
“The implications of climate change are well known (droughts, heat waves, extreme phenomena, etc),” study researcher Orfeu Bertolami told Live Science in an email. “If the Earth System gets into the region of chaotic behavior, we will lose all hope of somehow fixing the problem.”
Earth periodically experiences massive changes in climate patterns, going from one stable equilibrium to another. These shifts are usually driven by external factors like changes in Earth’s orbit or a massive surge in volcanic activity. But past research suggests we are now entering a new phase, one driven by human activity. As humans pump more carbon into the atmosphere, we are creating a new Anthropocene era, a period of human-influenced climate systems, something our planet has never experienced before.
In the new study, researchers modeled the introduction of the Anthropocene as a phase transition. Most people are familiar with phase transitions in materials, for instance when an ice cube changes phase from a solid to a liquid by melting into water, or when water evaporates into a gas. But phase transitions also occur in other systems. In this case, the system is Earth’s climate. A given climate provides for regular and predictable seasons and weather, and a phase transition in the climate leads to a new pattern of seasons and weather. When the climate goes through a phase transition, this means that Earth is experiencing a sudden and rapid change in patterns.
If human activity is driving a phase transition in Earth’s climate, that means we are causing the planet to develop a new set of weather patterns. What those patterns will look like is one of the most pressing problems of climate science.
Where is Earth’s climate headed? That depends significantly on exactly what our activity is over the next few decades. Drastically reducing carbon output, for example, would lead to different outcomes than changing nothing at all, the researchers wrote in the study.
To account for the different trajectories and choices that humanity could make, the researchers employed a mathematical tool called a logistic map. The logistic map is great at describing situations where some variable — such as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere — can grow but naturally reaches a limit. For example, scientists often use the logistic map to describe animal populations: Animals can keep giving birth, increasing their numbers, but they reach a limit when they consume all the food in their environment (or their predators get too hungry and consume them).
Our influence on the environment is definitely growing, and it has been for over a century. But it will naturally reach a limit, according to the researchers. For example, the human population can only grow so large and can only have so many carbon-emitting activities; and pollution will eventually degrade the environment. At some point in the future, carbon output will reach a maximum limit, and the researchers found that a logistic map can capture the future trajectory of that carbon output very well.
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Climate Change is “Widespread, Rapid and Intensifying”
The researchers explored different ways that the human logistic map could evolve, depending on a variety of factors like our population, introduction of carbon reduction strategies and better, more efficient technologies. Once they found how human carbon output would evolve with time, they used that to examine how Earth’s climate would evolve through the human-driven phase transition.
In the best cases, once humanity reaches the limit of carbon output, Earth’s climate stabilizes at a new, higher average temperature. This higher temperature is overall bad for humans, because it still leads to higher sea levels and more extreme weather events. But at least it’s stable: The Anthropocene looks like previous climate ages, only warmer, and it will still have regular and repeatable weather patterns.
But in the worst cases, the researchers found that Earth’s climate leads to chaos. True, mathematical chaos. In a chaotic system, there is no equilibrium and no repeatable patterns. A chaotic climate would have seasons that change wildly from decade to decade (or even year to year). Some years would experience sudden flashes of extreme weather, while others would be completely quiet. Even the average Earth temperature may fluctuate wildly, swinging from cooler to hotter periods in relatively short periods of time. It would become utterly impossible to determine in what direction Earth’s climate is headed.
“A chaotic behavior means that it will be impossible to predict the behavior of Earth System in the future even if we know with great certainty its present state,” Bertolami said. “It will mean that any capability to control and to drive the Earth System towards an equilibri
Bob Davis recently retired from the Wall Street Journal where he covered U.S.-China relations and is the co-author of Superpower Showdown, a history of the two nations’ economic battles.
Here’s some good news on the gloomy international scene: Tensions will ease significantly between the U.S. and China soon, as the Biden administration slashes consumer tariffs and Beijing welcomes the move, at least privately. Expect a new round of trade negotiations too. The thaw comes after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen makes a big push for change, and as Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, long dismissed as an also-ran, becomes a key player. President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping reluctantly go along.
At least that’s the surprising outcome of a forecasting model that the Central Intelligence Agency has used and praised — and which was deployed for POLITICO Magazine to seek insights on where the most important geopolitical relationship is going next.
Whether the predictions come to pass is anyone’s guess, of course, but we’re already seeing some echoes in the real world as Biden and his top officials debate what to do about China tariffs. And by parsing the potential interactions between policymakers, we can get a clearer picture of the decision-making processes occurring in different capitals. The model basically seeks to answer the question: Who is calling the shots, and how will they exercise power?
The idea for the exercise sprang from the Biden administration’s halting efforts to craft a new Asia economic policy to keep nations out of China’s orbit. (Biden finally launched what he calls the “Indo-Pacific Economic Framework” on Monday.) Jon Grady, a graduate student at New York University’s Stern Business School, proposed running a game theory exercise to forecast the next steps the U.S. and China would take in their economic rivalry. Grady, a preternaturally patient 32-year-old with a shaved head, licensed game theory software from Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, an NYU game theorist so prominent in the field that he’s known simply by his initials BDM.
BDM’s game theories are different from war games where experts play the roles of political leaders during a crisis. It’s also very different from simply asking experts in the field what actions either government might take. Bueno de Mesquita and other game theorists contend that experts do a crappy job of making predictions and war games lack rigor.
“An expert may be very, very skillful at telling you a very good story about Chinese history and telling good stories about possible future actions,” says Philip Tetlock, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist who has won a Pentagon forecasting competition. “That doesn’t translate all that well” into making predictions. Political experts are only slightly more likely to make accurate calls than a chimpanzee tossing darts, he says.
Forecasting strategies vary. The BDM model looks at power relations, figuring that decision-making is a battle of people following their self-interest and self-aggrandizement. Although the president has the most power in Washington, for instance, he is often thwarted by other power players who are more focused on an issue (i.e., the National Rifle Association on gun control) or inflexible (Joe Machin on Build Back Better). The model doesn’t try to assess the best possible resolution of a problem or the decision that would best reflect the national interest. The BDM model is more akin to assessing scorpions in a bottle.
For our exercise, we recruited experts to serve on the U.S. or China teams. The American team consisted of several people close to the Biden administration, including Matthew Goodman, an Obama National Security Council economic official; Daniel Russel, an Obama State Department Asia official; and Barbara Weisel, a former senior U.S. trade negotiator. Jeremie Waterman, who runs the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s China Center, and I were also part of that team.
On the China side were Lucy Hornby, a former Financial Times China reporter who is now a visiting scholar at Harvard; David Dollar, Obama’s Treasury representative in Beijing; James McGregor, who has spent decades in China representing American business; and Ryan Hass, an Obama NSC China expert.
The Players
U.S. players:
Matthew Goodman, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Daniel Russel, Asia Society Policy Institute
Barbara Weisel, Rock Creek Global Advisors
Jeremie Waterman, U.S. Chamber of Commerce China Center
Bob Davis, former Wall Street Journal senior editor
China players:
Lucy Hornby, former Financial Times China reporter
David Dollar, Brookings Institution
James McGregor, APCO Worldwide, greater China region
Ryan Hass, Brookings Institution
The game was designed in February to forecast whether China would ever meet its obligations to boost purchases of U.S. goods by more than $200 billion, as required under the Phase One trade deal negotiated under former President Donald Trump. And if Beijing didn’t — as seemed certain even before the game started — what the U.S. would do in response.
Ultimately, the game stretched on through the end of April. By that time, the trade deal had become somewhat irrelevant as Washington’s focus turned to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the impending midterm elections. Biden’s recent comments on whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan have also unsettled some China watchers. Fortunately, the game also examined broader questions of what economic moves the U.S. would take next to influence China and how Beijing would respond.
The Model
Developed by New York University political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the forecasting model make predictions by assessing power relations among decision makers. The model looks at four characteristics: decision makers’ influence, their positions on an issue, their negotiating flexibility, and their focus on the issue. The model’s algorithms calculate millions of different possible interactions, and using game theory, spits out the most likely outcome.
“The focus on China right now is much more on how they’re going to respond to Russia” than whether they will carry out a trade deal, said Goodman, the ex-NSC Asia hand now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, during an April 8 U.S. team meeting.
Under Grady’s prodding, the two teams were asked to list those in Washington and Beijing involved in deciding what to do next on U.S.-China trade relations. Then they would rank each player on a scale of zero-to-100 on four attributes: their influence, the importance of the issue to them, their position on the issue and how flexible they would be during negotiations.
In Washington, the team came up with two dozen power players, including White House officials, cabinet secretaries, business and labor lobbyists and four shades of lawmakers — progressive Democrats, labor Democrats, free-trade Republicans and agriculture state Republicans. For China, whose political decision-making is wrapped in mystery, the exercise was a struggle. It was tough to know who to pick beyond members of the ruling Politburo Standing Committee and some prominent economic and foreign policy advisers.
“I look at this more as a Tony Soprano setup where if [the top leaders] want something, they’ll figure out the corruption in each of the families and threaten them” to get what they want, said McGregor, chair of APCO Worldwide’s China region, who started in China as a Wall Street Journal reporter.
Next, each team was asked to rank the influence of the players — essentially how much clout they could bring to bear on the decision should they choose to battle for it. Joe Biden and Xi Jinping were ranked as 100. What combination of other players could equal Biden or Xi’s power, Grady asked the teams.
“It forces people to think logically and numerically about an issue,” Grady says.
The question initially stumped the team members. That’s not how decisions are made, they argued. White House chief of staff Ron Klain isn’t going to line up three cabinet members and march into the Oval Office and demand Biden make one decision or another.
Think of it differently, Grady said. Imagine that a group of officials argued to Biden in favor of a decision. Would they be able to convince him to accept their recommendation? Ditto with Xi and Chinese officials? What combination of officials would then equal the leader’s score of 100?
Still, the discussion had an otherworldly feel to it. It was like the conversations I had as a kid: If Batman and Wonder Woman fought with Superman, could they defeat him?
Eventually, the teams came up with rankings. The U.S. team decided that Klain had roughly half the influence of Biden, given his long relationship with the president and the broad mandate of a chief of staff. Then they ranked others compared to Klain. Janet Yellen had just about one-third of Klain’s influence on the China trade issue, they decided, and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai had about half.
On the Chinese side, the decisions were tougher, given how thoroughly Xi dominates politics there. By some accounts, he is the most powerful Communist Party leader since Mao Zedong. Eventually, the Chinese team decided that Vice Premier Liu He, Xi’s economic envoy to the U.S., had about one-third of Xi’s influence largely because of his mastery of economic issues and his deep roots in the Chinese bureaucracy. Premier Li, who has been overshadowed by Xi and seen much of his economic portfolio stripped away, had just about 10 percent.
On and on the assessments went. How would the teams rank each of the players, from zero-to-100 on their passion for the issue — what Grady called the issue’s “salience.” How flexible were they? What was their real position on U.S.-China relations, not just what they said in public?
At various points, the choices seemed arbitrary. How could anyone know what Wang Yang, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee who is viewed as having a shot at succeeding Li as premier, really thought about trade relations with the U.S.? Would he be more flexible in dealing with the U.S. because he might think that could improve China’s economic outlook? Or might he be less flexible for fear of being seen as weak?
McGregor broke the tension in the fourth and last meeting of the China team: “You guys are getting lost in the real world here,” he said. “This is a game.”
Still, the game players’ reactions reflected one of the biggest problems of forecasting. No matter how sophisticated the model, a model’s accuracy depends on the quality of the information it processes. Garbage-in, garbage-out.
To convince the players of the reliability of the BDM model, Grady would point to a Central Intelligence Agency assessment. The CIA compared the predictions by the BDM model in the 1980s to one it used and found BDM’s “got the bull’s eye twice as often.”
“The CIA study found [the BDM model] was accurate 89 percent of the time,” said Stanley Feder, a former CIA analyst who ran the review. “We used it pretty extensively at the CIA.” The study was declassified in 1995 and has been a marketing calling card for Bueno de Mesquita ever since.
Bueno de Mesquita has had some big hits. He correctly forecast the successors to the Ayatollah Khomeini five years before the Iranian leader died. But he admits to some misses too, including getting nearly every prediction wrong about how Bill Clinton’s health care bill would turn out. House Ways and Means Chair Dan Rostenkowski’s indictment, he says, messed up the model’s assumptions about his influence in pushing through legislation.
By the end of the game, Grady had U.S. team members put together a list of possible U.S. actions toward China with the lightest being removing all tariffs immediately and the harshest hitting Beijing immediately with a fresh round of sanctions without even bothering to seek industry input. In between was starting a new trade action that could eventually lead to sanctions.
As the U.S. players assessed how American authorities would look at the options, China’s behavior toward Russia became more important. Since President Richard Nixon unfroze relations with Beijing in 1972, trade has played a crucial role in bringing the U.S. and China closer together. Whatever the vast differences between the two political systems, both countries recognized that trade could benefit them by expanding markets and places for production. Even during the Trump administration, the two countries eventually signed a deal to end trade hostilities.
Russel, the former Obama State official who is now a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, a think tank, laid out the dilemma facing Biden officials. “Every week we get closer to the midterms, there will be pressure to do something that looks strong on trade,” he said in the third U.S. session on April 8. But on the other hand, “they don’t want to rock the boat” because they want to convince China to “exercise some degree of restraint in material support for the Russian military operation.”
As the game drew to a close at the end of April, the conundrum had the effect of elevating the power of Janet Yellen. That’s because the U.S. team saw her as laser-focused on removing tariffs, which Yellen complained were having an inflationary impact — although she has been talking tougher on China recently. Easing inflation could help Biden politically as well as act as an opening to the Chinese, which scored well in the forecasting model.
On the Chinese end, a similar dynamic was elevating the importance of Liu, the economic adviser, and Li, the premier. Both are responsible for China’s economy, which was starting to sputter due to unending Covid lockdowns. An easing of tariffs, especially if it indicated a possible rapprochement with the U.S., could help.
The BDM model uses the following equation: Influence X Salience = Power. While the influence of Yellen and Li started out as minimal, their salience — their focus on the trade issue — grew immensely as the game played out. Ergo, their power grew.
“Salience inflates the clout of some players that look like they don’t have much more clout because they care intensely,” says Bueno de Mesquita.
Once the game players ranked officials from zero-to-100 in the various categories, the computer model took over, with algorithms that used those rankings to play out millions of possible interactions between officials in both countries. The formulas look to assess the clout each country’s players have, how focused they are on the issue and other criteria. It also simulates interactions between U.S. and Chinese players.
The bottom line: In the U.S., Yellen’s power grew on the trade issue over time while Klain, who the team viewed as mainly interested in politics, saw his shrink. Biden went along with a position of eliminating most — but not all — tariffs on Chinese consumer goods. The computer model didn’t explain itself. It spit out spreadsheets filled with numbers. But a reasonable explanation for the finding would be that cutting some tariffs, but not all of them, could be presented as an overture to China but not caving in.
On the Chinese side, economic officials, including Premier Li and Vice Premier Liu, turned out to be much more flexible in negotiations than expected and had enough clout to convince ideologically minded officials to go along with them. Although all Chinese officials started off by demanding that the U.S. immediately lift all tariffs, the model forecast that the partial rollback would be welcome, and China would be open to negotiations where it would be willing to increase its U.S. purchases.
None of the experts recruited to play the game predicted the outcome forecast by the model, although a few said they hoped the model would turn out to be accurate. Most figured that the Biden team would pair any tariff relief with some aggressive action toward China too in order not to look weak.
The Takeaways
1) Expect a thaw in U.S.-China relations.
2) Russia’s war on Ukraine changes the equation on trade.
3) Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Premier Li Keqiang both pack a punch.
Grady said it wasn’t unusual for the players to disagree with the outcome of their work. As the U.S. Chamber’s Waterman noted, “We weren’t playing a war game, we were helping build an economic model” through assessments of power and influence.
Biden and Xi, who initially showed no interest in a deal, would go along, the model predicted, in part, because so much of their attention was now focused on other issues and because a deal met their needs. In fact, Biden said earlier this month that he was weighing whether to ease the tariffs. In the game, as in real life, the leaders make compromises they didn’t expect to make.
Carl Icahn speaking at Delivering Alpha in New York on Sept. 13, 2016.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Activist investor Carl Icahn lost his proxy fight withMcDonald’son Thursday, signaling that shareholders weren’t swayed by his animal-welfare concerns.
Preliminary counts of votes during the company’s annual shareholder meeting showed that Icahn’s board nominees only received votes from about 1% of outstanding shares, McDonald’s said.
Carl Icahn speaking at Delivering Alpha in New York on Sept. 13, 2016.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Activist investor Carl Icahn lost his proxy fight with McDonald’s on Thursday, signaling that shareholders weren’t swayed by his animal-welfare concerns.
Preliminary counts of votes during the company’s annual shareholder meeting showed that Icahn’s board nominees only received votes from about 1% of outstanding shares, McDonald’s said.
“Moving forward, McDonald’s Board and Leadership Team remain focused on continuing to take actions that uphold and advance our values while committing to serve the interests of all our shareholders,” the company said in a statement.
Icahn only owns about 200 McDonald’s shares, a tiny stake that didn’t give him much influence over votes. And, as the results show, he failed to win over his fellow shareholders with his criticism of McDonald’s environmental, social and corporate governance commitments and calling out large Wall Street firms for “hypocrisy.”
McDonald’s chairman Enrique Hernandez, Jr., said in prepared remarks obtained by CNBC that Icahn was invited to speak about his nominations at the meeting but he withdrew two days ago. Icahn did not attend the meeting.
A representative for Icahn declined to comment to CNBC.
Icahn’s proxy fight kicked off in February when the billionaire publicly criticized McDonald’s for failing to meet its original deadline for eliminating its suppliers’ use of gestation crates for pregnant pigs. He also claimed the company was supposed to ban the use of crates entirely but has since changed the scope of its commitment.
For its part, the Chicago-based company has blamed the Covid-19 pandemic and African swine fever outbreaks for pushing back the original deadline of 2022 that it set a decade ago. By the end of this year, McDonald’s now expects 85% to 90% of its U.S. pork supply to come from pigs that aren’t kept in gestation crates if they’re confirmed to be pregnant. McDonald’s has said that eliminating the use of the crates entirely would raise its costs and higher prices for customers.
McDonald’s said in a filing in early April that it expected to spend roughly $16 million in the proxy fight with Icahn.
The Humane Society of the United States had put forth a shareholder proposal echoing Icahn’s criticisms but withdrew it. The proposal asked the company to confirm it would reach its prior goal of eliminating the confinement of gestating pigs by 2022. Otherwise, the organization asked McDonald’s to disclose more information about its pork supply chain. Such shareholder proposals are nonbinding but can send a message to corporate boards about public support for company practices.
Josh Balk, the vice president of farm animal welfare for the Humane Society, said in a statement that the group withdrew the proposal because McDonald’s finally acknowledged that its suppliers are still confining pregnant pigs in crates.
Icahn is waging a similar proxy fight at Kroger, the largest U.S. supermarket chain operator in the U.S. Kroger’s annual meeting is scheduled for June 23.
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