Rep. Pramila Jayapal is on a roll. Over the past two days, the Democrat from Washington has orchestrated two of the most memorable exchanges in two separate House hearings. In the first, she exposed the naked racism and political motivations behind Attorney General William Barr’s attacks on Portland protesters. In the second, she all but caught Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a series of lies about Facebook’s business practices.

During Jayapal’s questioning of Barr on Tuesday, the attorney general tried to dispute that law enforcement officers used tear gas to disperse protesters for the president’s photo op near Lafayette Square in June. Officials have admitted to using chemical eye irritants in the attack on demonstrators, but, Barr said on Tuesday, “tear gas is a particular compound” that was not used. Jayapal stood firm. “I’m starting to lose my temper,” she told him, after he refused to address the substance of the question for the third or fourth time.

Barr also attempted to defend the deployment of federal agents to quash racial justice protests in Portland under the guise of protecting a federal building. Meanwhile, he denied ever hearing about the armed protesters in Michigan who, demanding an end to stay-at-home orders, stormed the state capitol and threatened to lynch Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in May. Jayapal pointed out the disparity in his responses to these two groups of demonstrators. When Barr tried to interrupt her to say he only cared about protests that affect federal property, Jayapal cut him off. “This is my time, and I control it,” she said. She went on:

When protesters carry guns and Confederate flags and Swastikas and call for the governor of Michigan to be beheaded and shot and lynched, somehow you’re not aware of that … because they’re getting the president’s personal agenda done. But when black people and people of color protest police brutality, systemic racism, and the president’s very own lack of response to those critical issues, then you forcibly remove them with armed federal officers, pepper bombs, because they are considered terrorists by the president.

Unlike her Democratic colleagues, who effectively questioned Barr on racism within police forces and his fear-mongering around mail-in voting, Jayapal didn’t get Barr on the record with any particularly damning statements. But her line of questioning offered more than just the hollow satisfaction of a good burn and the pleasure of watching a righteous legislator exert her power over a man who routinely abuses his. Most people don’t have the time or inclination to watch lengthy Congressional hearings. If there’s big news, they’ll read the headlines or watch clips on their nightly news shows, but much of the substance of these hearings often goes unnoticed. By reacting to Barr’s outrageous deflections with the outrage they warranted, Jayapal ensured she’d make headlines. Then, she gave viewers and readers a concrete example of the Trump administration’s racist hypocrisy, in bracingly clear language. Unlike Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who said in an address on Tuesday that “anarchists should be prosecuted”—leading some progressives to argue that Trump and Biden are “two sides of the same coin”—Jayapal made no mealy-mouthed qualifications. She focused the blame where it belonged: not on political dissidents, but on state entities that are violently attempting to suppress them.

Her line of questioning offered more than just the hollow satisfaction of a good burn.

On Wednesday, Jayapal emerged in the spotlight again. The House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee convened the giants of the tech world—Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook—to answer questions about their anticompetitive business practices. Jayapal began her Zuckerberg interrogation by quoting emails and statements from multiple Facebook executives, including the CEO himself, who’ve said that Facebook should block competitors from gaining traction in the marketplace and copy their products if necessary. Then, she asked him, “Has Facebook ever taken steps to prevent competitors from getting footholds by copying competitors?”

Zuckerberg dodged. So she rephrased: “Since March of 2012, after that email conversation, how many competitors did Facebook end up copying?” “Congresswoman, I—I can’t give you a number of companies,” Zuckerberg replied.

After Zuckerberg said he didn’t remember any conversations in which he’d threatened to copy competitors’ products if they didn’t let Facebook acquire their businesses, Jayapal read aloud quotes from an online chat transcript that showed Zuckerberg doing exactly that, in conversation with Instagram’s founder. “Facebook is a case study, in my opinion, in monopoly power, because your company harvests and monetizes our data and then your company uses that data to spy on competitors and to copy acquire and kill rivals,” Jayapal said. “These tactics reinforce Facebook’s dominance, which you then use in increasingly destructive ways.”

These hearings aren’t trials. In some cases, their public value is largely theatrical: The bigshots who are called to testify hedge and stall, while the members of Congress pontificate from their seats, putting on a show for their constituents. Wednesday’s hearing fit this mold. The antitrust subcommittee had already been investigating these companies for more than a year, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews and collecting more than 1 million documents. At the hearing, the members didn’t extract much new information. Their main job was to make public the information they already had—and to make their constituents care. And Jayapal has proven herself to be remarkably skilled at merging performance with substance.

If there was ever any illusion that elected officials in this pseudo-democracy could be trusted to uphold the laws that govern it, the events of the past few years should have extinguished that hope. Powerful corporations and politicians will not police themselves, and many members of Congress will not risk angering the donor class unless there’s a public outcry to justify it. Jayapal didn’t just catch Zuckerberg in a defensive posture about Facebook’s unjustifiable consolidation of power in the tech industry. She laid the groundwork for the rest of America to understand what Facebook has been doing, grasp the cynicism of Zuckerberg’s attempted self-exoneration, and connect the dots between Facebook’s anticompetitive strategies and its role in the erosion of American democracy. If Congressional Democrats ever hope to build popular support for breaking up or imposing stricter regulations on monopolies like Facebook, they’ll need people like Jayapal—who represents a district where many Amazon employees live—to sell the public on the urgency of the issue.

There is great value in confronting abuses of power directly, in public view, with such clarity.

Jayapal’s week of scorchings comes on the heels of another notable show of strength in the House. Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood on the House floor and addressed her Republican colleague, Rep. Ted Yoho, who’d called her a “fucking bitch” in front of an audience of reporters. She got a lot of approving (and deserved) press coverage of her speech, in which she laid into Republicans who’ve used their wives and daughters as shields against allegations of misogyny. Some would dismiss quotable, passionate, made-for-TV addresses like hers—and heated exchanges like Jayapal’s—as sound-bitey clapbacks with little concrete political import. But there is great value in confronting abuses of power directly, in public view, with such clarity. It gives people who haven’t been paying much attention an accessible explanation for why they should be worked up and the language they need to explain it to others.

It also gives many of us a worthy proxy for our impotent anger, transforming feelings of powerlessness into those of power. Yoho insists he said bullshit, not bitch, and besides, he says, Ocasio-Cortez deserved it; Zuckerberg insists that the threat he delivered to Instagram was no threat at all. It’s enough to make any rational, incensed observer wonder if she’s going mad—and yet, here are two members of Congress who firmly assure her she’s not. It is a formidable prophylactic against political apathy to see one’s fury at seemingly unchecked injustices expressed on a public stage by an elected official. It’s representative democracy at work.

LIKE MOST international jamborees these days the Farnborough air show wrapped up on July 24th as a virtual event. Webinars featuring grim-faced executives were not as entertaining as noisy acrobatic displays by fighter jets. But commercial aviation’s most important showcase at least marked a point when heads began to turn away from the devastation wrought by covid-19 and towards what comes next.

As airlines sell fewer tickets, owing to pandemic travel restrictions or travellers’ fear of infection, the industry that makes flying possible faces a reckoning. Aircraft-makers will make fewer passenger jets and so need fewer parts from their suppliers. Ticket-sellers will see less custom and airport operators, lower footfall. Many firms have cut output and laid off thousands of workers. The question now is how far they will fall, how quickly they can recover, and what will be the long-lasting effects.

The airline-industrial complex is vast. Last year 4.5bn passengers buckled up for take-off. Over 100,000 commercial flights a day filled the skies. These journeys supported 10m jobs directly, according to the Air Transport Action Group, a trade body: 6m at airports, including staff of shops and cafés, luggage handlers, cooks of in-flight meals and the like; 2.7m airline workers; and 1.2m people in planemaking. In 2019 they helped generate revenues of $170bn for the world’s airports and $838bn for airlines. Airbus and Boeing, the duopoly atop the aircraft supply chain, had sales of $100bn between them. For the aerospace industry as a whole they were perhaps $600bn. Add travel firms like Booking Holdings, Expedia and Trip.com, and you get annual revenues of some $1.3trn in normal times for listed firms alone, supporting roughly as much in market capitalisation before covid-19—and rising.

Taxiing times

Instead, the coronavirus has lopped $460bn from this market value (see chart 1). Airline bosses are reassessing trends in passenger numbers, which had been expected to double in the next 15 years, just as they had with metronomic regularity since 1988, despite blips after the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 and the financial crisis of 2007-09. Rather than increase by 4% this year, air-transport revenues will fall by 50%, to $419bn. After ten years of unusual profitability the $100bn of total losses forecast for the next two years is equal to half the nominal net profits the industry raked in since the second world war, calculates Aviation Strategy, a consultancy. Luis Felipe de Oliveira, director-general of ACI World, which represents the world’s airports, gloomily predicts that revenues there will fall by 57% in 2020.

The engine-makers provide a case in point. Besides lower demand for their kit—Rolls-Royce was gearing up to supply 500 units a year to Airbus but will now probably make 250—they face a collapsing aftermarket for spares and fewer overhauls, points out David Stewart of Oliver Wyman. Airlines with in-house maintenance divisions can scavenge parts or whole engines from grounded planes. Rolls-Royce, whose engines power two-fifths of all long-haul jets, has suspended dividends, said it would cut 9,000 jobs and taken a £2bn ($2.6bn) loan. It may have to ask investors for another £2bn. GE’s second-quarter revenues from its aviation business fell by 44%, year on year, dragging down the conglomerate’s overall results (see article).

At the other end of the air-travel industry are airports. About 60% of their revenues comes from charges on airlines and passengers, and the rest from things like retail and parking. All are taking a hit. Airport shops and restaurants in America will lose $3.4bn between now and the end of 2021, forecasts the Airport Restaurant & Retail Association. As Mr de Oliveira of ACI World notes, two in three airports were losing money before the crisis; now all are. Some smaller ones may close if subsidies to support tourism from regional and national governments start to dwindle. Outside America commercial operators have not been treated by governments as generously as airlines have.

In July Standard & Poor’s again downgraded the debt of four European airports, including Amsterdam’s Schiphol and Zurich, and placed London Gatwick and Rome on watch, questioning their ability to raise charges while airlines continue to bleed cash. The rating agency estimates a cut of €10bn ($11.8bn) in planned capital spending by European airports in 2020-23, which may crimp efforts to install contactless technology that could help reassure travellers that terminals are safe to re-enter.

As dark as the skies have grown for the air-travel complex, there are some opportunities. Airlines are restructuring. Europe’s big legacy carriers, under pressure from low-cost rivals, are slashing costs. BA has suspended 30,000 workers and wants to rehire them on less generous terms. Bankruptcies and cutbacks will leave gaps in the market, aircraft are cheap, once-scarce pilots are plentiful, and airports will have spare slots, if they are allowed to redistribute them.

Strong challenger carriers have a chance to gain market share. Wizz Air, a Hungarian low-cost carrier, hopes to add capacity by March; its main markets in central and eastern Europe have been hurt less by the pandemic than those elsewhere, its customers are generally young and less worried about getting on a plane, and two-thirds of demand is related to visiting family and friends, which seems more resilient to covid-19 than business travel is.

Some carriers may radically rethink their financial structures, which could help leasing grow even faster. Domhnal Slattery, boss of Avolon, a big lessor, thinks that heavy debts airlines incur to survive the pandemic may convince many of them that they need not own aircraft but should instead concentrate on sales and marketing, just as hotel chains have turned their backs on owning property.

The industry is also rethinking its environmental footprint. Bolder airlines with stronger balance-sheets may use the crisis to renew their fleets, making them greener. They have bargaining power: everything is negotiable, including deferrals, prepayments and price.

Rolling with the punches

Warren East, boss of Rolls-Royce, suspects that the “pre-covid call for sustainability will come back stronger than ever”. Airbus is still committed to the journey to zero-emissions flying, Mr Faury says; he sees it as an opportunity. Boeing would have to respond to stay competitive. European governments in particular regard it as a priority. France’s €15bn aid package for its aerospace sector includes a €1.5bn research-and-development fund to help Airbus launch a zero-emissions short-haul passenger jet by 2035 (probably powered by either biofuels or hydrogen). Mr Faury accepts that there is less money to invest. But also, he says, “more need”. The crisis has led to greater collaboration with suppliers that could make innovation “faster, leaner and cheaper” (though that has meant laying off 15,000 workers).

China, desperate to become a power in commercial aerospace, may see the disruption as a way to speed up entry into the global market, says Robert Spingarn of Credit Suisse, a bank. He speculates that Brazil’s Embraer, whose merger with Boeing fell apart in April, might collaborate with China’s COMAC to build a plane capable of competing against Airbus and Boeing. The Brazilians could supply the industrial knowhow and the Chinese the industrial might.

To the masked passengers on half-empty planes, boarded from ghost-town airports of shuttered shops, it may seem that the experience of flying will never be the same again. Yet aviation has bounced back before. It is likely to do so again—and may change for the better in the process. ■

Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Terminal conditions”

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The Coca-Cola Company will be expanding its brand portfolio to include a hard seltzer beverage later this year, a spokesperson at the company has confirmed for FOX Business.

The new drink’s name is Topo Chico Hard Seltzer and it will be made from Topo Chico Mineral Water – a sparkling water company that has sourced and bottled water in Monterrey, Mexico since 1895 and was bought by Coca-Cola in 2017 for $220 million.

HARD SELTZER REACHED RECORD SALES JULY 4 WEEK: NIELSEN

Topo Chico has reportedly “been popular with many mixologists,” according to a press release issued by Coca-Cola on Thursday.

Moreover, Coca-Cola’s boozy beverage will be offered in select Latin American cities at some point in 2020. An exact date has not been specified. Though, the U.S. is scheduled to distribute Topo Chico Hard Seltzer in 2021, a Coca-Cola spokesperson told FOX Business.

The Coca-Cola Company – which had an estimated 43.3 percent of the U.S. market share in 2018, according to research from Statista – is no stranger to sparkling drinks or alcoholic beverages. In fact, the company has been building on these drink categories in recent years domestically and abroad.

DURING CORONAVIRUS BOSTON BEER COMPANY’S TRULY HARD SELTZER SMASHES SALES

Outside of Topo Chico, Coca-Cola’s water brands Dasani, Smartwater, I LOHAS and Ciel all hve sparkling variants, and in late 2019, the company launched its flavored sparkling water brand AHA.

Meanwhile, in Japan, Coca-Cola introduced Lemon-Do in May 2018. The lemon-flavored alcoholic beverage rolled out with ABV contents of three-, five-, seven- and nine-percent in a nine-month span, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal last year.

CHEAP BOOZE, HARD SELTZER SALES SPIKE DURING COVID-19

Interestingly enough, Coca-Cola President and CEO James Quincy told Yahoo! Finance that the company would not be selling alcoholic beverages in the U.S. after the successful launch of Lemon-Do.

However, sparkling soft drinks declined by 12 percent in North America, Western Europe and India, according to Coca-Cola’s Second Quarter 2020 Results. The cause was “due to pressure in away-from-home channels,” the report stated.

READ MORE ON FOX BUSINESS BY CLICKING HERE

The hard seltzer market, on the other hand, has seen explosive growth in the last two years. The category surpassed $1 billion in off-premise sales during the week of the Fourth of July holiday, a to market research report from Nielsen showed earlier this month.

Beer and alcohol companies have launched or have announced plans to launch hard seltzer brands unlike most soft drink companies.

Monster Beverage Corp is one soft drink company that has reportedly discussed hard seltzer’s potential internally, according to a report from The Motley Fool, but Coca-Cola also has a minority stake in the company 16.7 percent, which it bought in June 2015 for $2.15 billion.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ON FOX BUSINESS

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Las Vegas Sands President Robert Goldstein told CNBC on Thursday that the city of Las Vegas will continue to struggle economically as the coronavirus pandemic persists. 

“It’s clearly a difficult time for us … and from my perspective, we’re in for some more pain around here,” Goldstein said in an interview on “The Exchange” with CNBC’s Contessa Brewer. 

Goldstein’s comments come two days after the announcement that CES, the U.S.’ biggest technology show, will be an online-only event in January due to the coronavirus — yet another blow to the economy of Las Vegas, where CES is held. Last year, the multiday event had more than 171,000 attendees from across the world. 

“Las Vegas … is a large-scale city by any means you measure it: 150,000 sleeping rooms, large conventions, large banquets. Large is the word for Las Vegas, so not exactly an easy place to be in this environment,” said Goldstein, who called CES going virtual “hurtful short term” for the city. 

Casino resorts in Las Vegas closed due to the coronavirus in mid-March and began to reopen on June 4.

Las Vegas is a destination city dependent on tourism, especially from visitors who fly in. For Las Vegas to recover meaningfully, Goldstein said, a vaccine to prevent Covid-19 or “something that changes the consumer perception of this virus” is needed. “And I don’t see that happening short term,” said Goldstein, who also is chief operating officer. 

Las Vegas Sands, which generates about 90% of its EBITDA from Macao and Singapore, did receive a bit of relatively positive news this week as the Chinese government will begin broader visa issuance for Macao. The company generates a little over 60% of its revenue from the Chinese territory and casino hub. 

“It’s a step in the right direction, but not the step,” Goldstein said, because the change to visa issuance policy does not yet cover tourists. “We’re tourist-driven.” 

However, Goldstein said he believes that a restart to the critical program known as the individual visit scheme, or IVS, may not be too far off. “I think it will happen in the course of the summer or fall. It will be slow. It will not be large steps. It will be a series of small steps leading to a full-scale IVS opening both for Guangdong and all of China at some point,” he said. “What that point is, no one really knows.” 

But he added: “We do know that the Asian consumer, the Chinese consumer, is very conversant with a virus environment. They’re used to masks and gloves and social distancing and temp checks. They’re not going to respond like Americans, who had a hard time with it. We also know that they’re not going to travel beyond China, so I think Macao will become a very favorable destination when those doors do open.” 

Shares of Las Vegas Sands were higher by more than 3% on Thursday, outperforming the broader S&P 500, which was trading slightly negative. The company, founded by CEO Sheldon Adelson, reported last week net revenues were down 97% year over year for the quarter that ended June 30. It posted a net loss of $985 million for the quarter. 

Despite the financial challenges the pandemic has presented for the company, it recently said it was extending its pledge to maintain employee benefits and pay through at least Oct. 31. In a letter to employees obtained by CNBC’s Brewer, Adelson said he believed Las Vegas Sands was the only casino operator not to furlough or lay off workers due to the Covid-19 crisis. 

Adelson feels that “supporting people in these difficult times is the right thing to do from a moral perspective, at a time when this city is really having some incredible challenges,” Goldstein said. “But also business wise, we believe this pandemic will eventually go away and we’ll be at the head of class in terms of desirability both for customers and also for employees.” 

— CNBC’s Contessa Brewer contributed to this report.

The surge in Facebook usage during early shelter-in-place orders in the United States was not just a blip. Daily users of Facebook increased 12 percent year over year, to 1.79 billion. Monthly usage across its family of apps, which also include Instagram and WhatsApp, rose 14 percent, to 3.14 billion. And Facebook’s mostly ad-based based business rose along with them: the company’s revenue was up 11 percent year over year, to $18.69 billion.

“We’re glad to be able to provide small businesses the tools they need to grow and be successful online during these challenging times,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “And we’re proud that people can rely on our services to stay connected when they can’t always be together in person.”

The company’s stock surged more than 5 percent in after-hours trading.

While Facebook has thrived during the pandemic, its growth is still lower than that of other tech giants. For example, Amazon revenue grew 40 percent to $89 billion in earnings announced Thursday, beating analyst expectations by roughly $8 billion. Still, Facebook did better than Alphabet, where revenue declined 2 percent year over year.

But the company’s numbers are impressive in part because of a high-profile advertiser boycott that roiled the social network in July. Coca-Cola, Lego, Starbucks, and Unilever are among the companies that pulled advertising from Facebook and other social networks, driven by a coalition of civil rights groups that accused them of doing too little to stop the spread of hate speech.

Even without big-brand advertisers, Facebook was able to grow revenue on the strength of the millions of small businesses that rely on it for direct-response advertising. Facebook said in the first three weeks of July, revenue growth was roughly in line with its second quarter growth rate of 10 percent, indicating that the company had largely shrugged off the boycott.

As it did last quarter, the company warned that increased engagement may not last once the COVID-19 pandemic begins to subside. “More recently, we are seeing signs of normalization in user growth and engagement as shelter‑in-place measures have eased around the world, particularly in developed markets where Facebook’s penetration is higher,” the company said.

Usage will be flat or slightly down next quarter, the company said.

Facebook has $58.24 billion in cash and cash equivalents on hand, the company said. It now has 52,534 employees, up 32 percent from a year earlier.

Google parent company Alphabet warned in last quarter that it was expecting to see the impact of coronavirus in the second quarter results, and it did: the company saw its first revenue decline in its history. But it managed to beat Wall Street’s revenue expectations.

Total revenue for the quarter was $38.3 billion, versus the $37.4 billion expected, but that marks a 2 percent decline from the second quarter of 2019. Net income dropped to $6.9 billion, from $9.9 billion a year ago,. Revenue for Search was $21.3 billion, down from $23.6 billion.

“We continue to navigate through a difficult global environment,” CFO Ruth Porat said in a statement announcing the earnings.

One bright spot was YouTube, where advertising revenue rose to $3.81 billion, from $3.6 billion last year. Google’s Cloud division saw rising revenue as well, to $3.01 billion from $2.1 billion in the year ago quarter.

During a call with analysts, Porat said she was “cautiously encouraged” by the company’s growth near the end of the quarter, which ended June 30th, but added “we believe it its premature to gauge the durability of recent trends given the obvious uncertainty of the global macro environment.”

CEO Sundar Pichai said on the call that while the economic climate remained fragile due to the coronavirus pandemic, “we saw the early signs of stabilization as users returned to commercial activity online.”

Pichai said YouTube and Google Play subscriptions saw “good traction” in the quarter, with app and game downloads rising 35 percent. It added some large customers to its Cloud segment, including Deutsche Bank, Pichai added, and Cloud also benefited from the number of people working from home during the pandemic. “Customers are choosing Google Cloud to either lower their costs by improving operating efficiency or to drive innovation,” he said.

Revenue for Alphabet’s Other Bets category — which includes its experimental X lab, Waymo self-driving subsidiary, and a number of other divisions like its Verily life sciences unit was down, to $148 million from $162 million a year ago. Other Bets saw an operating loss of $1.12 billion.

Google “other revenues,” which includes its hardware, Play Store, and non-advertising YouTube revenues — reported $5.12 billion, up from $4 billion.

Asked about the anti trust investigations into Google’s search and Android businesses, Pichai said the company would “adapt,” adding, “I think the scrutiny is going to be here for a while.”

Alphabet was one of four tech giants reporting quarterly earnings on Thursday, and the only one whose results showed a decline from the year-ago quarter. Its stock rose slightly in after-hours trading Thursday.