Today's WorldView: Uber Files put Macron’s neoliberalism in the spotlight

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Try four weeks FREE, then $4 every four weeks the next year  Sign up for this newsletter Read online Developments from Ukraine, global analysis and top reads.       By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  Email   Uber Files put Macron's neoliberalism in the spotlight French President Emmanuel Macron waves from his car as he leaves after voting in the second stage of French parliamentary elections at a polling station in Le Touquet, northern France on June 19. (Michel Spingler/AFP/Getty Images) In 2017, newly-elected French President Emmanuel Macron trumpeted a new vision for his country's economic future. "I want France to be a start-up nation," he said, voicing his desire then to make France a competitive tech player on the world stage and to usher in a flourishing of Silicon Valley-style enterprises. Half a decade later, Macron can point to a record of success. In January, he hailed the emergence of 25 French tech "unicorns" — now each valued over $1 billion — comfortably ahead of his own earlier target of having 25 such companies by 2025. By 2019, once-notoriously statist France had already become the leading destination for foreign investment in all of Europe. This was in part thanks to liberalizing measures the French president pushed through, including cuts to the corporate tax rate, a flat tax on capital gains and the streamlining of France's labor code that made it easier to hire and fire employees. Macron's government helped encourage billions of dollars worth of foreign investment into the tech sector and offered generous tax credits to certain types of tech businesses. "American funds were afraid of France for mythical reasons: the taxes, the strikes, a lot of fantasies," Romain Lavault, general partner at Partech Ventures in Paris, told Bloomberg News last year. "They have been courted, and it's worked." [About the Uber Files investigation] His political opponents, who battled Macron in a bruising presidential and parliamentary election cycle this year, long resented Macron's approach. They argued that it sundered France's social solidarity and drove deeper economic inequality. Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon decried what he dubbed the "Uberization" of French society — invoking the U.S. ride-share leviathan as part of a catchall descriptor for Macron's perceived assault on French worker rights in the service of the interests of wealthy elites. Until this week, we didn't quite know how on the nose that term was. Amid a slew of revelations contained within a mammoth leak of documents is considerable evidence of Macron's cozy dealings with Uber while serving as France's economy minister from 2014 to 2016. As my colleague Rick Noack noted: "Macron's backing went far beyond what has been known publicly and on occasion conflicted with the policies of the leftist government he served." The more than 124,000 company documents were leaked by Mark MacGann, a former high-ranking Uber executive and European lobbyist, to the Guardian. The outlet shared the vast trove with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which helped lead the project, and dozens of other news organizations, including The Washington Post. The Uber Files, which date to between 2013 and 2017, reveal the ride-hailing company's aggressive entrance into cities around the world — while frequently challenging the reach of existing laws and regulations. "I was the one talking to governments, I was the one pushing this with the media, I was the one telling people that they should change the rules because drivers were going to benefit and people were going to get so much economic opportunity," MacGann said in an interview published Monday. "When that turned out not to be the case — we had actually sold people a lie — how can you have a clear conscience if you don't stand up and own your contribution to how people are being treated today?" MacGann had a direct line to Macron while the latter was economy minister. In one instance, after local officials in Marseille had banned UberX service in the fall of 2015, MacGann texted Macron for help. "I will look into this personally," Macron wrote back. "Let's stay calm at this stage." The local authority in Marseille soon backtracked. As the documents revealed, Macron was considered internally by Uber as a "true ally." At a time when Uber's notoriously aggressive tactics of expansion landed it in legal hot water, Macron and his staff held several undeclared meetings with company executives. Uber executives "believed that Macron was willing to support them by pushing for more lenient treatment of the company from regulators," Noack wrote. Even as legal scrutiny of Uber began to increase — including from Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Prevention — authorities attached to Marcon's own ministry, MacGann wrote in a 2014 email to colleagues that the French President had "told his cabinet to talk to the DGCCRF to ask them to be 'less conservative' " in interpreting the law. Asked for comment ahead of publication of the documents, the French presidency said in a statement to The Post and other outlets that the "economic and employment policies at the time, in which [Macron] was an active participant, are well known" and that his "functions naturally led him to meet and interact with many companies." Macron's championing of Uber and similar gig work is no secret. In a 2016 interview, he defended the company, telling his interlocutor to go to a poor suburb and "tell young people there who are willingly working for Uber that it would be better to do nothing or deal drugs." But the Uber Files have triggered a new firestorm of criticism. They show Macron to be "a lobbyist at the service of foreign private economic interests," far-right politician Sebastien Chenu told France Info radio on Monday morning, attacking the president as an "an ideologue for deregulation, for globalization." Aurélien Taché, a former member of Macron's centrist party who is now part of the left-wing opposition in parliament, described the findings as a "state scandal" that raised questions about Macron's "conception of loyalty in politics." Fabien Roussel, leader of the French Communist Party, said Macron's behavior was "against all our rules, all our social laws and against workers' rights." Mathilde Panot, the parliamentary leader of Mélenchon's party, said Macron had presided over the "pillage of the country" and had been an agent for a "U.S. multinational aiming to permanently deregulate labor law." Though they have few constitutional mechanisms to call Macron in for questioning, opposition parliamentarians hope to launch some form of special inquiry into his actions. A separate no-confidence vote against Macron's prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, failed Monday. Macron, as he has for much of his tenure, remained aloof. On Monday, he hosted a major summit of some 180 foreign business executives in the palace at Versailles. Billions of dollars of new deals were on the table, including a close to $6 billion proposal to build a new semiconductor factory near the Italian and Swiss borders. The event is dubbed "Choose France."   1,000 Words NASA's revolutionary, long-delayed $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope has produced its first full-color image, and it's a doozy: a glimpse deep into space and back in time, capturing the faint light of galaxies forming in the infancy of the cosmos. "We're looking back more than 13 billion years," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said. He added: "And by the way, we're going back further. Because this is just the first image. … We're going back almost to the beginning." (NASA/ESA/CSA via AP)   Developments from Ukraine • Iran is preparing to supply Russia with hundreds of drone aircraft, including advanced models capable of firing missiles, the Biden administration said, publicly revealing what U.S. officials say is a secret effort by Tehran to provide military assistance for Russian's invasion of Ukraine. • Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree that would expand a fast-track procedure for Russian citizenship to all citizens of Ukraine, according to a government portal that tracks new laws. The procedure since 2019 applied to residents of Donetsk and Luhansk, and was broadened after the invasion to areas under Russian control. Now, it extends to the entire country.  • The main natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, Nord Stream 1, shut down for scheduled maintenance, raising concerns that Moscow could use the repairs as a pretext for a longer shutdown as it wields energy supplies as leverage in the Ukraine war. • Russian strikes hit the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, leaving 31 people hospitalized, including young children, Gov. Oleh Synyehubo said.    Top of The Post Uber promised South Africans better lives but knew drivers risked debt and danger By Douglas MacMillan ●  Read more »   Judge rejects Bannon's bid to delay trial, executive-privilege claim By Spencer S. Hsu ●  Read more »   Shinzo Abe's funeral to be held Tuesday for family, close friends By Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Julia Mio Inuma ●  Read more »     Viewpoints How Cuba's investment in writers and artists came back to haunt its regime By Parjanya Christian Holtz ●  Read more »   Rise of the anti-woke weirdos By Jesse Singal | The Spectator World ●  Read more »   The liberation of the Arabs from the global left By Hussein Aboubakr Mansou | Tablet Magazine ●  Read more »     Chemical agents Islamic State forces parade in an Iraqi security forces armored vehicle in Mosul in 2014. (Associated Press) In the summer of 2014, as his followers were ravaging the cities of northern Iraq, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi convened a secret meeting with a weapons expert whose unusual skills the terrorist chief was anxious to acquire. His guest was a small man, barely above 5 feet tall, and he had only recently been freed from a years-long stint in U.S. and Iraqi prisons. But before that, Salih al-Sabawi had been an Iraqi official of some renown: a Russian-trained engineer who had once helped President Saddam Hussein build his extensive arsenal of chemical weapons. Baghdadi had summoned Sabawi, 52, to offer him a job. If supplied with the right equipment and resources, could he produce the same weapons for the Islamic State? Sabawi's reply, according to a later intelligence report about the meeting, was yes. He could do that and more. Thus began what U.S. and Iraqi Kurdish officials describe as a crash effort aimed at building the biggest arsenal of chemical and, potentially, biological weapons ever assembled by a terrorist group. Within six months, under Sabawi's direction, the Islamic State would manufacture mustard gas, a chemical weapon from the World War I era, as well as bombs and rockets filled with chlorine. But Sabawi's ambitions, and by extension Baghdadi's, were much broader, according to newly disclosed details on the Islamic State weapons program. Iraqi Kurdish intelligence reports, seen by The Washington Post, shed new light on the role played by Sabawi, a mysterious figure known within the terrorist group as Abu Malik, and the ambitious plan by Islamic State leaders to develop and use weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and abroad. New insights also are emerging from a U.N. investigation that is combing through millions of pages of Islamic State records as it seeks evidence of the group's war crimes. In addition, several current and former U.S. officials in interviews with The Post spoke for the first time in detail about an urgently planned military operation, conducted in 2015 by U.S. Special Operations forces with assistance from Kurdish Peshmerga operatives, to kill Sabawi and crush the weapons program before it reached maturity. U.S. officials learned through electronic surveillance in 2014 that Sabawi was working to produce powerful new weapons using highly lethal botulinum toxin and ricin, while also pursuing plans to make weaponized anthrax. Botulinum toxin, a neurotoxin derived from same bacteria that causes botulism, was explored as potential weapon by both the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Ricin, a toxin extracted from castor beans, was weaponized by the Soviets and used in political assassinations. Sabawi's intention, current and former U.S. officials said, was to create a large stockpile consisting of multiple types of chemical and biological agents to be used in military campaigns as well as in terrorist attacks against the major cities of Europe. "They were specifically looking at Western Europe," a senior U.S. official knowledgeable about Islamic State operations said. Like several other U.S. and Iraqi officials, he spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details obtained from sensitive surveillance operations. "We know they were also interested in U.S. military bases, on the continent, or really anywhere," the official said. "They were ultimately going to go with the easiest target." – Joby Warrick Read more: ISIS planned chemical attacks in Europe, new details on weapons program reveal   Afterword shredding   We think you'll like this newsletter Check out Coronavirus Updates for news to help you stay safe and informed during the pandemic. Sign up »

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