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delgadool

Opinion | What if They Held an Impeachment Trial and Nobody Came? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Thousands of families on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border are betting that laxer rules coming from the Biden administration will make it easier for them to get to the United States and remain here. And tougher rules by the Mexican government make it more difficult for the U.S. to deport them back to Mexico. Throw in fears about further spread of the coronavirus, and it has the makings of the administration’s first self-made crisis.
  • As with Newton’s third law of motion, every progressive action will have an equal and opposite Trumpian reaction. Which is why Biden needs to seize the middle ground here.
  • It’s an improvement that relief may now be capped at $2,800 for couples making less than $100,000 a year (or $1,400 for individuals making less than $50,000). But I’d rather we spend more money on the neediest rather than sending relief to the middle class.
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  • About 1.3 million people are getting a dose every day now, with more on some days, so let’s see how it goes and then revisit this conversation.
katherineharron

Key moments from the second day of Trump's impeachment trial - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • "He told them to 'fight like hell,' and they brought us hell that day," Rep. Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, said as he kicked off the House's presentation.
  • "The evidence will show you that ex-President Trump was no innocent bystander. The evidence will show that he clearly incited the January 6 insurrection. It will show that Donald Trump surrendered his role as commander-in-chief and became the inciter-in-chief of a dangerous insurrection."
  • One security video played by the House impeachment managers showed Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman running as the mob begins to enter the Capitol. Goodman passes Romney and redirects him from the rioters' path before continuing to the first floor to respond to the breach and divert the mob from lawmakers.
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  • "We know from the rioters themselves that if they had found Speaker Pelosi, they would have killed her,"
  • The House impeachment managers revealed for the first time Wednesday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was evacuated entirely from the US Capitol complex during the insurrection to a secure off-site location.
  • Romney told reporters after the video played that it was "obviously very troubling" and that he hadn't known he had come that close to the rioters.
  • Wednesday's security footage also showed for the first time how the then-vice president was evacuated during the episode as rioters breached the Capitol, looking for him.
  • Some of the new security footage Democrats presented Wednesday showed how close Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and security detail came to encountering the rioters.
  • The footage shows Schumer walking up a ramp with his security when the group is forced to quickly change directions and run back in the direction they came.
  • "They came within just yards of rioters," said Rep. Eric Swalwell,
  • The Democrats showed how rioters were calling out for Pelosi as they moved through the halls of the Capitol, before showing new security footage of Pelosi's staffers barricading themselves in a conference room not long before rioters entered her suite of offices, trying to force open the door where the aides were in hiding.
  • The footage shows Pence and his family quickly moving down a set of stairs.
  • "As the rioters reached the top of the stairs, they were within 100 feet of where the vice president was sheltering with his family, and they were just feet away from one of the doors to this chamber," she explained. In one video, the crowd can be heard chanting "hang Mike Pence" as they stood in the open door of the Capitol building.
  • "After President Trump had primed his followers for months and inflamed the rally-goers that morning, it is no wonder that the vice president of the United States was the target of their wrath, after Pence refused to overturn the election results," Plaskett continued.
  • No. 2 Senate Republican John Thune of South Dakota saying the House impeachment managers did an "effective job" and were "connecting the dots" from Trump's words to the insurrection
  • Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said he found much of the House impeachment managers' case against Trump jarring, adding that the rioters' attempts to thwart a peaceful transfer of power should alarm anyone who loves America.
  • Still, there's no sign that Senate Republicans are going to consider convicting Trump, no matter how compelling the Democrats' presentation may be. Forty-four of the 50 Senate Republicans voted Tuesday that the trial was unconstitutional, a defense most if not all of those senators are likely to cite if they vote to acquit Trump.
  • Rep. Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, a Democratic House impeachment manager, choked up as she closed her remarks by describing the loud bang that was heard when she was in the chamber that had been surrounded by rioters.
  • "So they came, draped in Trump's flag, and used our flag, the American flag, to batter and to bludgeon," Dean said. "And at 2:30 p.m., I heard that terrifying banging on those House chamber doors. For the first time in more than 200 years, the seat of our government was ransacked on our watch."
  • "I didn't learn anything that I didn't already know. We know a mob reached the Capitol and wreaked havoc in the building. I'm waiting for them to connect that up to President Trump and so far that hasn't happened," he said.Asked if he is worried the video will have an emotional impact on the jury, he said, "It would have an emotional impact on any jury. But there are two sides of the coin and we have not played ours."
martinelligi

Here Are The 7 Republicans Who Voted To Convict Donald Trump : Trump Impeachment Afterm... - 0 views

  • Seven GOP senators voted with Democrats — the most bipartisan impeachment vote in U.S. history — but well short of the 17 needed to convict the former president
  • "When this process started, I believed that it was unconstitutional to impeach a president who was no longer in office," he said. "I still believe that to be the case. However, the Senate is an institution based on precedent, and given that the majority in the Senate voted to proceed with this trial, the question of constitutionality is now established precedent."
  • This impeachment trial is not about any single word uttered by President Trump on Jan. 6, 2021," she said. "It is instead about President Trump's failure to obey the oath he swore on January 20, 2017. His actions to interfere with the peaceful transition of power – the hallmark of our Constitution and our American democracy – were an abuse of power and constitute grounds for conviction."
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  • Murkowski said she had upheld her oath as a senator to listen to both Trump's defense team and impeachment managers impartially, but that the facts were clear to her that Trump was responsible for the violence at the Capitol.
  • This wasn't Romney's first time harshly criticizing Trump or breaking ranks with his party. He was the only Republican to vote to convict Trump on one article during the former president's first impeachment trial in 2020, and in recent weeks was called "a joke" and a "traitor" by Trump supporters while traveling from Utah to Washington, D.C.
  • "In my first speech here in the Senate in November 2015, I promised to speak out when a president – even of my own party – exceeds his or her powers," he said. "I cannot go back on my word, and Congress cannot lower our standards on such a grave matter, simply because it is politically convenient. I must vote to convict."
  • "As a result of President Trump's actions, for the first time in American history, the transfer of presidential power was not peaceful," he said. "A lawless attempt to retain power by a president was one of the founders' greatest fears motivating the inclusion of the impeachment authorities in the U.S. Constitution."
Javier E

The Capitol rioters speak just like the Islamist terrorists I reported on - The Washing... - 0 views

  • In interviews with well-educated, often middle-class and seemingly moderate young men, I documented what was then the new and growing appeal in the West of Islamist violence built on false history and a deep, debilitating sense of victimhood.
  • domestic radicalism has deep parallels to jihadist terrorism: Both movements are driven by alienation from the political system and a resulting breakdown in social norms.
  • For some groups and individuals, this breakdown leads to violence they see as justified to achieve political ends.
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  • Since 9/11, 114 people have been killed in attacks by right-wing terrorists in the United States vs. 107 by jihadist terrorists, according to data compiled by New America.
  • Followers of both are drawn to a cause greater than themselves that gives them a shared identity and a mission to correct perceived wrongs, by whatever means necessary. At the core of this cause is a profound sense of victimization and humiliation.
  • Today’s American extremists think (because they’ve been told by the former president and other leaders) the system is rigged against them and is bent on dismantling everything they believe in.
  • For both groups, their sense of oppression is built on fantasy. I interviewed many Islamist terrorists with middle-class upbringings, steady jobs and graduate degrees.
  • Among the rioters who assaulted the U.S. Capitol were doctors, business owners and real estate agents — more victors than victims of the system.
  • “The militants often experience their humiliations vicariously — ‘our religion is supposedly under attack’ for the jihadis, ‘our race is purportedly under attack’ for the Proud Boys,”
  • Just as I had countless debates with Muslim extremists convinced that every event and institution (currency movements, the 2004 Iranian earthquake, the CIA, the United Nations) was diabolically conspiring against them, I now find myself having similar mind-numbing arguments with Americans about “deep state” plots, best exemplified by the “stolen” 2020 election and the Mueller investigation.
  • In both cases, adherents no longer believe that government or institutions will solve their problems. (Annual polling by Gallup shows that confidence in Congress, the presidency, the criminal justice system, newspaper and television news, banks, and big business is at or near historical lows.)
  • So they feel compelled to take matters into their own hands, even by acts of violence.
  • Similarly, during the “war on terror” in the Middle East, U.S. officials lamented the lack of public confidence in institutions and promised to fix them, in part to divert recruits away from extremism.
  • I asked then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper if he ever applied the intelligence community’s metrics for failed states to the United States. “If you apply those same measures against us, we are starting to exhibit some of them, too,” he told me. “We pride ourselves on the institutions that have evolved over hundreds of years, and I do worry about the . . . fragility of those institutions.” He described “legal institutions, the rule of law, protection of citizens’ liberty, privacy” as “under assault.”
katherineharron

First on CNN: Biden's Covid plan gets backing from more than 150 top business leaders -... - 0 views

  • More than 150 senior executives from some of the largest American companies across several major industries have lined up behind President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, according to a letter obtained by CNN.
  • The group of executives includes the top executives representing some of the powerful business interests in the US, ranging from bank and investment firms like Goldman Sachs and Blackstone, to technology companies like Google, Intel and IBM, to hospitality companies like Loews Hotels & Co. and airlines including American and United Airlines. Top executives from real estate, insurance and utility firms also signed on to the letter.
  • "Congress should act swiftly and on a bipartisan basis to authorize a stimulus and relief package along the lines of the Biden-Harris administration's proposed American Rescue Plan."
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  • Biden, over the course of his first month in office, has relentlessly pressed lawmakers to pass his cornerstone legislative proposal, which includes funding for schools, vaccine distribution and infrastructure, states and localities, direct payments and extensions of expiring unemployment insurance programs.
  • Among those signed onto the letter are bold faced names including David Solomon, chairman and chief executive officer at Goldman Sachs; Stephen Schwartzman, the chairman and CEO of Blackstone; Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google; John Zimmer, the co-founder and president of Lyft; Brian Roberts, the chairman and CEO of Comcast and John Stankey the CEO of AT&T.Read More
  • Republican support, to this point at least, has remained non-existent, with even moderate GOP senators amenable to talks calling Biden's proposal too large in scale and scope given the trillions in emergency aid deployed over the first year of the pandemic.
  • Biden, however, has been steadfast that his mandate is to "go big," and in recent days has challenged opponents of his plan to outline specifically what they'd like to strip from the package.
  • "Now critics say the plan is too big," Biden said at the White House on Monday. "Let me ask the rhetorical question -- what would you have me cut? What would you have me leave out?"
  • "Strengthening the public health response to coronavirus is the first step toward economic restoration," the executives wrote. "The American Rescue Plan mobilizes a national vaccination program, delivers economic relief to struggling families, and supports communities that were most damaged by the pandemic."
Javier E

Opinion | Let's call it what it is. We're in a Pandemic Depression. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • It must be clear to almost everyone by now that the sudden and sharp economic downturn that began in late March is something more than a severe recession
  • “This situation is so dire that it deserves to be called a ‘depression’ — a pandemic depression,” write economists Carmen Reinhart and Vincent Reinhart in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. “The memory of the Great Depression has prevented economists and others from using that word.”
  • People don’t want to be accused of alarmism and making a bad situation worse. But this reticence is self-defeating and ahistoric. It minimizes the gravity of the crisis and ignores comparisons with the 1930s and the 19th century. That matters. If the hordes of party-goers had understood the pandemic’s true dangers, perhaps they would have been more responsible in practicing social distancing.
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  • What’s clear is that the Pandemic Depression resembles the Great Depression of the 1930s more than it does the typical post-World War II recession
  • The collateral damage has been huge. Small businesses accounted for 47 percent of private-sector jobs in 2016
  • reports an 8 percent drop in the number of small businesses from February to June. Among African Americans, the decline was 19 percent; among Hispanics, 10 percent.
  • If — at the time — government had been more aggressive, preventing bank failures and embracing larger budget deficits to stimulate spending, the economy wouldn’t have collapsed. The Great Depression wouldn’t have been so great.
  • the Reinharts distinguish between an economic “rebound” and an economic “recovery.” A rebound implies positive economic growth, which they consider likely, but not enough to achieve full recovery
  • This would equal or surpass the economy’s performance before the pandemic. How long would that take? Five years is the Reinharts’ best guess — and maybe more.
nrashkind

Australian retailers suffer record sales slump, backs grim outlook for second-quarter G... - 0 views

  • Australian retail sales suffered a historic plunge in April while the trade surplus narrowed as the coronavirus battered the economy, leaving the nation facing its worst ever contraction in the current quarter.
  • Retail sales slumped a seasonally adjusted 17.7% in April, their biggest on record, from an 8.5% jump in March, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) showed on Thursday.
  • Separate data showed exports dropped 11% and imports 10% in some of the largest declines in years.
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  • With much of the world in recession, exports of everything from iron ore to coal to gold took a hit in the month.
  • On the import side the biggest swing was in tourism as globe-trotting Australians were barred from going abroad due to the pandemic.
  • That saw debits on tourism shrink to just A$49 million in April from A$2.8 billion in March and A$4.3 billion in February, boosting the monthly trade balance.
  • Analysts are predicting Australia’s gross domestic product (GDP) could fall roughly 8% in the current quarter, with the dive in April retail sales alone subtracting 2.1 percentage point off GDP.
  • That would leave the economy facing its first recession in nearly three decades following the 0.3% contraction last quarter.
anonymous

History's deadliest pandemics: Plague, smallpox, flu, covid-19 - Washington Post - 0 views

  • But history shows that past pandemics have reshaped societies in profound ways. Hundreds of millions of people have died. Empires have fallen. Governments have cracked. Generations have been annihilated. Here is a look at how pandemics have remade the world.
  • Many historians trace the fall of the Roman empire back to the Antonine Plague, which swept Rome during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Nobody has ever nailed down the exact cause, but symptoms recorded by a physician named Galen — gruesome skin sores, high fever, diarrhea and sore throats — strongly suggest it was smallpox and measles.
  • Thought to be the world’s first episode of bubonic plague, its namesake was the Byzantine emperor who was in power when it hit, likely arriving in the form of infected fleas hitching rides across the world on the backs of rodents.
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  • Frank M. Snowden, a Yale historian who studies pandemics, wrote in his book “Epidemics and Society” that definitive accounts of this plague have largely vanished.
  • History Today, a monthly magazine of historical writing published in London, calls this pandemic “the greatest catastrophe ever.” The number of deaths — 200 million — is just astounding. Put it this way: That would be like wiping out roughly 65 percent of the current U.S. population. (Covid-19 disease modeling predicts U.S. deaths to potentially reach 240,000.)
  • Like the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death was caused by the bubonic plague.
  • Explorers arrived to the New World bearing more than just turnips and grapes. They also brought smallpox, measles and other viruses for which New World inhabitants had no immunity.
  • There were no treatments. If you caught it, you had roughly two weeks to live. This caused people to become desperate.
  • Again, blame the rats with those pesky fleas on their backs: “They were attracted by city streets filled with rubbish and waste, especially in the poorest areas,” according to the National Archives in England. While doctors, lawyers and royalty fled town, the poor were ravaged by the disease
  • it is estimated that upwards of 80–95 percent of the Native American population was decimated within the first 100–150 years following 1492
  • The epidemic that swept London in 1854 spawned the sort of epidemiological investigations that take place in disease outbreaks today. That’s thanks to John Snow, an English physician who almost single-handedly took on the bacteria. While some scientists suspected cholera was transmitted through the air, Snow thought otherwise. “Through carefully mapping the outbreak, he finds that everyone affected has a single connection in common: they have all retrieved water from the local Broad Street pump,”
  • according to a CDC history. He ordered the pump-handle turned off, and people stopped getting sick.
  • In 1793, yellow fever swept through Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital, killing roughly 10 percent of the population. President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson high-tailed it out of town, ultimately settling on Washington as the nation’s capital.
  • It wasn’t until 1900 that U.S. Army researchers “pinpointed mosquitoes as the transmission vector for the disease,” according to a vaccine history project at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
  • The covid-19 pandemic has inspired lots of comparisons to the 1918 flu, sometimes called the Spanish flu, which got its name not because it originated in Spain but because it was World War I, and Spain was the only country being honest about the toll the pandemic took on the country.
  • The flu came in two waves, starting in 1918 and ending in 1920. The number of infected is staggering —as many as 500 million, with estimates of 50 million deaths worldwide, according to the CDC.
  • One man saw it coming: Maurice Hilleman. The doctor later regarded as the godfather of vaccines was working at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 1957 when he read a New York Times article about a nasty flu outbreak in Hong Kong that mentioned glassy-eyed children at a clinic.
  • Hilleman requested samples of the virus be shipped to U.S. drugmakers right away so they could get a vaccine ready. Though 70,000 people in the United States ultimately died, “some predicted that the U.S. death toll would have reached 1 million without the vaccine that Hilleman called for,” according to the Philadelphia vaccine history project. “Health officials widely credited that vaccine with saving many lives.”
  • Before covid-19, this was the world’s most recent pandemic, infecting as much as 21 percent of the world’s population. Swine flu was a hodgepodge of several different flu strains that had never been collectively seen together
brookegoodman

Uber disposes of tens of thousands of bikes, sparking backlash - CNN - 0 views

  • Washington, DC (CNN)Videos and photos are surfacing of thousands of Uber's Jump bikes and scooters stripped of parts and crammed into trucks to be scrapped.
  • Roughly 20,000 to 30,000 Jump vehicles have now disappeared from streets nationwide in recent weeks, according to estimates from four former Jump employees. Uber confirmed that tens of thousands of its bikes and scooters are being "recycled."
  • Asked why Lime did not take all of Jump's bikes, the spokesman said the company took the newest bikes that will allow it to offer a quality bikeshare service over the long term. The rest were left for Uber to deal with.
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  • "Our acquisition of JUMP was a direct investment in the idea that the best way to get around a city is sometimes not in a car at all," Khosrowshahi said in a Sept. 2018 blog post. By 2019, Uber users were taking six times as many trips on Jump's vehicles compared with the year before.
  • Shared bikes like Jump's are generally made with proprietary parts, which better protects them from theft and vandalism, but makes it all but impossible for a local bike shop to perform maintenance.
  • Bikeshare companies have donated bikes in the past, and some groups told CNN Business they would have been interested in such an offer.
  • Unlike Spin and Ofo bicycles, Jump's bikes have the additional wrinkle of an electric battery, which wasn't designed to be charged in someone's home. The battery could be removed, but the bikes weigh about 75 pounds, making them difficult to pedal.
  • Cris Moffitt, who posted online videos of Jump bikes being scrapped, said he hoped to spur the company to donate any remaining bikes to a non-profit. Moffitt said he depended on a bike in college to get to work and school after he wrecked his car.
Javier E

America's Underlying Injustice Won't Just Disappear - The Bulwark - 1 views

  • after inauguration day on January 20, 2021, the curtain will rise on the opening act of the hard and unglamorous business of governing again.
  • The media would have us believe there are only two cultures in America right now: Red and Blue. But in fact, our country comprises more cultures than any of us can possibly be aware o
  • Now we have to fix it. And a little humility won’t hurt that process a bit.
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  • We must find the grace to welcome others into our big tent, including those with whom we have disagreed in the past, if we want to build the future.
  • Is this a call for appeasement or betraying our demands for justice, transparency, and accountability? No, it’s an awareness that ours are not the only passions out there
  • Which means both parties will have to own their part in contributing to forty years of declining economic mobility, an unconscionably racist prison-industrial complex, 1 in 5 children living in poverty, a stock market economy wholly unhooked from the workers who drive it, and so much corruption and money in politics that the percentage of Americans who support a given law has literally 0% bearing on whether that law will pass.
  • We cannot have reconciliation without truth.
  • We either start getting there together. Or we won’t get anywhere at all.
  • The Framers designed a government that barely works and only works at all when nobody gets everything they want. The reason they did that is because every other form of government is worse, and ends up as tyranny
  • If you’re not willing to be part of the flawed but ever-evolving, ever-disappointing solution, then you’re part of the problem. And if you’re part of the problem, nobody’s going to care about your stated ideals anyway.
Javier E

American Boogaloo: Meme or Terrorist Movement? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Disturbingly, the boogaloo movement is at least the third example of a mass of memes escaping from 4chan to become a real-life radical political movement, the first being the leftist-libertarian hacktivist collective Anonymous, which emerged in 2008; the second was the far-right fascist group of angry young men called the alt-right, which formed in 2015. (The conspiracy theory QAnon might be considered a fourth, but it is more than a political movement.)
  • their arrival can be explained by tracing their online origins. Similar to other right-leaning extremist movements, they are the product of an unhappy generation of men who compare their lot in life with that of men in previous decades and see their prospects diminishing. And with a mix of ignorance and simplicity, they view their discontent through the most distorted lens imaginable: internet memes.
  • The birthplace of the boogaloo movement, 4chan’s /k/ section, is ostensibly devoted to the ownership and purchase of weapons. But in practice, it is a space where weapons discussions combine with 4chan’s politicized male anger.
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  • Since its founding in 2003, 4chan has attracted a unique population of deeply cynical men, once all young, but now aged from their 40s down to their teens, who generally use the board to express their angst through dark humor. People who are unhappy with the circumstances of their life tend to retreat there. The unhappier they are, the longer they stay and the more they post.
  • The memes about a new civil war spread from /k/ to various groups on Facebook and Reddit, all with names that evoked the terms boogaloo, igloo, or luau. Enthusiasts also congregated in group chats using services such as Discord.
  • The message board /k/’s culture overlapped heavily with 4chan’s virulently racist politics discussion board /pol/. However, by 2017, the movement that had developed there—the alt-right—had largely imploded, after the disastrous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
  • By 2018, as talk of fascism declined on /pol/, the more libertarian and less overtly racist culture of 4chan’s /k/ and the boogaloo movement began to fill the empty niche.
  • The co-option of Hawaiian imagery and igloos was inherently cynical and meaningless. There was no connection to the group’s ideology outside of the linguistic resemblance of the word boogaloo to igloo and luau. But this co-option fit the ethos of online spaces perfectly, with a niche group celebrating its anti-government, libertarian views by draping them in colorful jokes and nonsense that could be remixed and reinterpreted endlessly.
  • The politics of the boogaloo boys are deeply contradictory and varied but can be roughly summed up by a few agreed-upon ideas. They are libertarian, in favor of gun rights, and opposed to government police forces. Many users say they are active-duty service members or military veterans.
  • As with the alt-right, many boogaloo posts are about men in crisis, humiliated or debased. Intermingled with memes about revolution are nostalgic images and video clips, glitched out to look like old VHS tapes, of what they imagine was the ideal existence: being the patriarch of a middle-class American nuclear family sometime between the 1950s and the 1990s.
  • The catalyst was similar to what mobilized so many young people on the left: the notion that the government enriched a privileged few at the expense of the people. In this, the boogaloo boys shared the anti-corporatist left’s belief that the government had betrayed public trust by maintaining a growing police force to perpetuate an unjust status quo.
  • I’m not surprised by the odd mixture of ideologies that the boogaloo movement encompasses. One of my first sources was a chan-going Black man in his 30s, an accelerationist Communist who was friends with a variety of radicals, including many in the alt-right. What these men shared was years of marginalization and a hatred of the present state of society.
  • As decades of rising inequality produced successive generations who felt they were consigned to the fringes, 4chan became an outlet to express rolling waves of escapist memes and radical anger. Among the left, this uptick in radicals and the corresponding increase in funding for law-enforcement agencies have generated further support for protests aimed at defunding the police and diverting the funds to social programs
  • But 4chan occupies a unique place on the social web, distinct from more mainstream sites. If 4chan’s history is any indication, it’s extremely likely that some portion of these social-media users and posters on /k/ are federal agents. Having interviewed many young men who ran chan-style sites, I know that state security agencies knock on their doors early and often and ask for comprehensive records.
  • before most people, including myself, got wind of the boogaloo movement, Rutgers University had generated a “contagion and ideology report” for law-enforcement agencies in February that detailed the group’s online network. Its conclusion: The boogaloo boys are terrorists. Its recommendations: more law enforcement, more surveillance.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Do the Rich Have So Much Power? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • America is, in principle, a democracy, in which every vote counts the same. It’s also a nation in which income inequality has soared, a development that hurts many more people than it helps. So if you didn’t know better, you might have expected to see a political backlash: demands for higher taxes on the rich, more spending on the working class and higher wages.
  • In reality, however, policy has mostly gone the other way. Tax rates on corporations and high incomes have gone down, unions have been crushed, the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1960s. How is that possible?
  • The answer is that huge disparities in income and wealth translate into comparable disparities in political influence.
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  • To see how this works, let’s look at a fairly recent example: the budgetary Grand Bargain that almost happened in 2011.
  • In other words, in 2011 a Democratic administration went all-in on behalf of a policy concern that only the rich gave priority and failed to reach a deal only because Republicans didn’t want the rich to bear any burden at all.
  • Why do the wealthy have so much influence over politics?
  • Campaign contributions, historically dominated by the wealthy, are part of the story. A 2015 Times report found that at that point fewer than 400 families accounted for almost half the money raised in the 2016 presidential campaign.
  • Outright bribery probably isn’t much of a factor, but there are nonetheless major personal financial rewards for political figures who support the interests of the wealthy.
  • even the issues that the news media discuss often reflect a rich person’s agenda
  • a lot of it probably reflects subtler factors, like the (often false) belief that people who’ve made a lot of money have special insight into how the nation as a whole can achieve prosperity.
  • In a variety of ways, then, America’s wealthy exert huge political influence. Our ideals say that all men are created equal, but in practice a small minority is far more equal than the rest of us.
  • You don’t want to be too cynical about this. No, America isn’t simply an oligarchy in which the rich always get what they want. In the end, President Barack Obama presided over both the Affordable Care Act, the biggest expansion in government benefits since the 1960s, and a substantial increase in federal taxes on the top 1 percent, to 34 percent from 28 percent.
  • And no, the parties aren’t equally in the wealthiest Americans’ pocket. Democrats have become increasingly progressive, while the rich dominate the Republican agenda.
  • But while you shouldn’t be too much of a cynic, it remains true that America is less of a democracy and more of an oligarchy than we like to think. And to tackle inequality, we’ll have to confront unequal political power as well as unequal income and wealth.
Javier E

The Republicans least committed to democratic principles are those most worried about W... - 0 views

  • There are certain elements that are central to the American democratic experiment. Rule of law. Equal opportunity. A government determined by free, open, democratic elections. These values are at times strained — or intentionally constrained — but they are precepts that are central to the way in which the country governs itself.
  • They are also ideas that Americans seem increasingly willing to abandon. That’s particularly true among one subset of the population: Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who hold views centered on concern about the growing non-White minority.
  • Research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences articulates the link between what author Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University describes as “ethnic antagonism” and views that run contrary to core democratic principles.
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  • Bartels’s research involved asking respondents whether they agreed with each of four statements:
  • “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it."
  • “A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”
  • “Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done."
  • “It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.”
  • Most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed with the first statement, that it might be necessary to use force to save the “traditional American way of life.”
  • Now, Trump and Fox News remind them, implicitly or explicitly, on an almost-daily basis.
  • Respondents were significantly more likely to say they agreed with the other two statements than that they disagreed.
  • Bartels was interested in determining what factors overlapped with support for those statements. A number of basic demographic factors — education, amount of interest in politics, region — didn’t yield any significant differences.
  • Positions like thinking that Black Americans or immigrants get more than their share of government resources or seeing discrimination against Whites as a problem matching discrimination against Blacks were categorized as contributing to a respondent’s “ethnic antagonism” value. And the higher that value registered, the more likely respondents were to agree with the anti-democratic statements.
  • Bartels described anti-democratic sentiment in the Republican Party as “grounded” in this sort of skepticism about or hostility to non-White Americans.
  • “Even in analyses including elaborate measures of partisan attitudes, views of President Trump, economic conservatism, cultural conservatism, and political cynicism," he wrote, “ethnic antagonism stands out remarkably clearly as the most powerful factor associated with willingness to resort to force in pursuit of political ends and support for ‘patriotic Americans’ taking the law into their own hands and ‘strong leaders’ bending rules.”
  • “One of the most politically salient features of the contemporary United States is the looming demographic transition from a majority-White to a ‘majority-minority’ country,”
  • Several years ago, reminding White Americans of that prospect significantly altered their political attitudes.
  • Nearly three-quarters agreed that election results should be treated with skepticism, given the amount of “handouts” people receive
  • “It’s impossible to say whether or how those sentiments might translate into anti-democratic behavior,” he wrote to The Post, “but they certainly provide a troubling reservoir of potential public support for ugly behavior by extremists and would-be authoritarians.”
mattrenz16

Opinion | Republicans and Democrats Need to Work Together. Earmarks Can Help. - The New... - 0 views

  • Lawmakers now have a duty to hunker down and find ways to make progress on critical issues. But with both chambers of Congress narrowly divided and ideologically polarized, coming together on even the most modest deals could prove daunting.
  • One promising move under consideration: bringing back congressional earmarks.
  • Loosely speaking, earmarks are spending requests — or, depending on your definition, also limited tax or tariff benefits — inserted into bills at the behest of individual lawmakers for the benefit of specific entities in specific locations.
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  • In the big picture, earmarks add up to little more than a rounding error, generally constituting not more than 1 percent of the federal budget. They are used to determine spending priorities, not spending levels, meaning they determine how the pie gets divided rather than how big it is.
  • As conceived, earmarks allow the people who presumably best understand a state or district — its elected officials — to direct federal dollars to where they are most needed.
  • In 2011, Republicans assumed control of the chamber and went even further, declaring a moratorium on earmarks.
  • In 2007, the Democratic-controlled House began reforming the practice, increasing transparency and accountability.
  • This ban has made Congress less accountable and more dysfunctional. It is time to abandon the experiment.
  • Since America’s earliest days, they have proved a useful tool for building coalitions. (The first known instance of congressional earmarking dates to the Lighthouse Act of 1789.)
  • Considering the thicket of crises the nation is facing, big-ticket legislation, including another meaty round of coronavirus relief, is precisely what is needed.
martinelligi

Justice Barrett's Vote Could Tilt the Supreme Court on Gun Rights - The New York Times - 0 views

  • A Second Amendment case decided last week by the federal appeals court in Philadelphia is a promising candidate for Supreme Court review, not least because it presents an issue on which Justice Barrett has already taken a stand.
  • It concerns Lisa M. Folajtar, who would like to buy a gun. But she is a felon, having pleaded guilty to tax evasion, which means under federal law she may not possess firearms.
  • She sued, arguing that the law violated her Second Amendment rights. A divided three-judge panel of appeals court rejected her challenge, saying that committing a serious crime has consequences. It can lead to losing the right to vote, to serve on a jury — or to have a gun.
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  • “History does not support the proposition that felons lose their Second Amendment rights solely because of their status as felons,” she wrote. “But it does support the proposition that the state can take the right to bear arms away from a category of people that it deems dangerous.”
  • “Lisa Folajtar asks us to treat her as an equal member of society,” he wrote. “Though her tax-fraud conviction affects some of her privileges, it does not change her right to keep and bear arms.”
  • Voting and jury service are different, she wrote, because those are “rights that depend on civic virtue.”
  • In 2017, for instance, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, wrote that they had detected “a distressing trend: the treatment of the Second Amendment as a disfavored right.”
  • Dissenting from that ruling, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. noted that the Heller decision “recognized that history supported the constitutionality of some laws limiting the right to possess a firearm,” including ones “prohibiting possession by felons and other dangerous individuals.”That last phrase, which did not appear in the earlier decision, may be significant. In shifting the focus to dangerousness, it seemed to open the door to the position taken by Justice Barrett.
  • In June, however, the court turned down some 10 appeals in Second Amendment cases. Since it takes only four votes to grant review, there is good reason to think that the court’s conservative wing was unsure it could secure Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s vote.Justice Barrett’s arrival changes the calculus. Should Ms. Folajtar appeal to the Supreme Court, it is a good bet that Justice Barrett will find her arguments persuasive.
  • For years, conservative justices have said the court disfavors the Second Amendment. Justice Amy Coney Barrett is likely to shift the balance, and a case to help her do so may be knocking.
  • ThanksgivingWelcome to Homeownership
  • In dissent, Judge Stephanos Bibas, a former law professor appointed to the court by President Trump (and the author of a scathing decision on Friday rejecting the president’s challenge to the election results in Pennsylvania), wrote that the framers of the Constitution would not have allowed lawmakers to bar felons convicted of nonviolent crimes from owning guns.
  • That dissent was written by Justice Barrett when she was a judge on the federal appeals court in Chicago. The law forbidding people with felony convictions from owning guns, she wrote, should not apply when the crimes in question were nonviolent.
  • Before Justice Barrett’s arrival, the court’s four most conservative justices had repeatedly written that the court should return to the subject of the Second Amendment
Javier E

Europe's Deadly Second Wave: How Did It Happen Again? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Beyond the holiday season, a false sense that rapid reopenings would lead to rapid economic gains led many governments to adopt policies that backfired.
  • “Europeans wanted it all,” said. Prof. Devi Sridhar of the Edinburgh University Medical School. “In Europe people are still wondering ‘Is it worth it, should we protect people or the economy?’,” she said, adding that experience shows this is a false dilemma.
  • Economic forecasts from Europe indicate that the small gains made during the summer months have been wiped out in the second wave, as the spike in economic activity coinciding with the summer months quickly plummeted. Overall, the E.U. economy is predicted to shrink by more than 7 percent this year.
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  • Mixed messages, misinformation and a relaxed attitude were spreading in Central and Eastern Europe throughout the summer, experts say. "I am glad we are less and less afraid of this virus, of this epidemic. You don't have to be afraid of it anymore," Mateusz Morawiecki, prime minister of Poland, said as he urged voters to July polls. "All of you, especially the elderly, don't be afraid, let's go and vote,” he added.
  • “Politicians were saying that the virus has weakened and the pandemic is over, and maybe it didn’t even exist. That put people in doubt, and led to a growing group of people who doubt the virus, its origins and consequences,” Ms. Afelt said.
  • Second wave lockdowns were slower and softer than those in the first wave, experts note, and in many cases they have not been strictly enforced, curbing their effectiveness, even as societies suffer economic losses and disruption. A collective exhaustion with new restrictions made it harder to get widespread support and compliance.
  • “There was a certain hesitancy to reintroduce the measures after the summer, because we all knew what they meant in terms of the economy and society,” said Bruno Ciancio, the head of disease surveillance at European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
  • “That hesitancy didn't really pay off. When you reach the levels that you see now, you have to go back to those measures anyway, but the price you pay is very high in terms of hospitalizations and deaths,” he added.
  • The few countries that did move fast saw great benefits. Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway have kept the second wave at bay. Ireland has recorded fewer than 300 deaths since September 1, just 15 percent of its first wave total, after a tough and early second national lockdown.
Javier E

Opinion | Covid-19 Came for the Dakotas - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Dakotas are a horror story that didn’t have to be, a theater of American disgrace. Want to understand the tendencies — pathologies might be the better word — that made America’s dance with the coronavirus so deadly? Visit the Dakotas.
  • “It’s mind-boggling,” Jamie Smith, the leader of the Democratic minority in South Dakota’s House of Representatives, told me. He was referring primarily to how politicized such basic safety measures as social distancing and masks became, but also to many South Dakotans’ distrust of science and unshakable belief that the virus wouldn’t come for them.
  • the most stubborn, he said, have been the loudest. Throughout the pandemic, he said, he was deluged with communications from constituents adamantly opposed to any mask-wearing requirement, which North Dakota didn’t even have. He heard almost nothing from the other side.
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  • after Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, used an executive order on Nov. 13 to institute precisely such a mandate, a poll showed that a significant majority of North Dakotans favored it.
  • the state definitely should have taken that step last spring or summer — before the number of coronavirus cases skyrocketed, before hospitals were so overrun that sick North Dakotans had to be sent to neighboring states and before his own mother tested positive and died in early October.
  • Until recently, Governor Burgum was loath to exert much pressure on North Dakotans and steered clear of the social-distancing orders put in place by so many other states. But he did invest heavily in testing and never merrily shrugged off the threat of the coronavirus the way his Republican counterpart in South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem, did.
  • South Dakota, in contrast, was No. 1. Still no mask mandate there, and no leadership at all from Noem, who didn’t just welcome but beckoned President Trump to Mount Rushmore for that enormous Independence Day rally, the one at which his perpetually maskless entourage clustered near a similarly maskless crowd
  • Just before Thanksgiving, Noem announced the passing of her 98-year-old grandmother, one of 13 residents of a South Dakota nursing home who died in a two-week period. The home’s administrator told The Daily Beast that the other 12 residents, along with many of the nursing home’s workers, had tested positive for the coronavirus, but not Noem’s grandmother. (Hmmm …) While Noem publicly mourned her lost family member, she drew no particular attention to Covid-19’s rampage among her grandmother’s companions.
  • When I said “horror story,” I was cribbing. That was a description used in a series of mid-November tweets from a South Dakota emergency room nurse, Jodi Doering, that went viral. Doering was reeling from tending to dying Covid-19 patients who continued to insist that the coronavirus was some kind of hoax.
  • They “scream at you for a magic medicine” and warn that Joe Biden will ruin America even as they’re “gasping for breath,” she wrote. She added: “They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that ‘stuff’ because they don’t have Covid because it’s not real.”
  • “They stop yelling at you when they get intubated,” she wrote. “It’s like a horror movie that never ends.”
  • The truth is that the Dakotas are as emblematic as they are exceptional
  • In resisting the lockdowns, slowdowns and sacrifices that many other states committed to, they indulged and encouraged a selective (and often warped) reading of scientific evidence, a rebellion against experts and a twisted concept of individual liberty that was obvious all over the country and contributed mightily to our suffering.
  • “North Dakotans will come to each other’s aids in a heartbeat, but when asked to give up personal freedom for an amorphous common good — that’s difficult,
  • wrote to him to share a famous quotation from Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
  • “We maybe believed that our rural nature sheltered us from what cities like yours were experiencing,” Carson said. “Then we found out, very brutally, that was wrong.”
anonymous

Strong Job Growth, a Terrible Job Market: The Bizarre 2020 Economy - The New York Times - 0 views

  • he Bizarre 2020 Economy
  • 17 months for employment to return to full health.
  • hree concepts: the level at which the economy is functioning, how fast it is improving, and whether that speed is accelerating or decelerating.
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  • Editors’ PicksJim Carrey Plays Joe Biden in ‘S.N.L.’ Season PremiereHow to Have a Disagreement Like an Adult, According to Deepak Chopra30 Years After Reunification, Old German-German Border Is a Green OasisAdvertisementContinue reading the main story
  • The level of the bath water is very low. But it’s being filled rapidly. However, the spigot is being tightened so the pace at which the water is rising has slowed.
  • Disney’s plan to cut 28,000 theme park workers. Major airlines are poised to cut tens of thousands of jobs after the expiration of a provision requiring them to keep workers on their payrolls as a condition of bailout money.
  • The incumbent party points to whatever looks good in the data as proof that its policies are working, and the challenger identifies flaws that remain.
  • We may not know the answers to those questions, but it matters a lot for understanding what kind of economy either a second-term President Trump or President Joe Biden will have to handle. For now it’s not looking good.
leilamulveny

Coronavirus Surge in Mail Voting Likely to Lead to More Rejected Ballots - WSJ - 0 views

  • Around 1% of them were rejected nationally in the 2016 general election, according to the federal U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Common reasons include ballots being received after the deadline or voters not signing the ballot envelope or supplying a signature that doesn’t match state records.
  • The state’s Supreme Court ruled last month that those mailed without the secrecy envelope, also called “naked ballots,” should be disqualified.
  • In North Carolina, more than 300,000 people have already successfully cast ballots by mail in the general election through Thursday, more than the total cast by mail in 2016. Still, around 3.4% of ballots returned had errors, so far slightly higher than four years ago, the State Board of Elections said.
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  • “Many voters are casting their ballots by mail for the first time, so some mistakes are expected,”
  • North Carolina, along with more than 30 other states, offer voters who make certain errors that would invalidate their ballots—such as missing or mismatched signatures—a chance to correct them.
  • . For the presidential race, the Trump and Biden campaigns have vowed full-scale efforts to monitor voting and ballot counting
  • Republican and Democratic parties are engaged in legal battles in many states over voting rules.
  • In the June primary in New York City, thousands of ballots were rejected for not being postmarked on time, for voters failing to sign the backs of envelopes and for other reasons, according to candidates
  • Mr. Smith’s research has found mail-in ballot rejections tended to disproportionately affect younger or inexperienced voters and racial minorities in previous elections. Those voters generally lean Democratic.
  • For the general election, voters have already cast 2,105,553 mail-in ballots and 94,338 early in-person votes, based on data from 22 states collected by the Associated Press as of Friday.
  • Democrats are urging voters to vote early, whether by mail or in person. “Ensuring voters know all the multiple options for voting—in person and by mail—is a central focus down the stretch,” said Biden campaign spokesman T.J. Ducklo.
  • Academic studies—such as ones from Dartmouth College and New York University’s School of Law—have found no evidence of widespread fraud in recent U.S. elections.
  • estimated in a publicly released letter to state lawmakers that 100,000 voters statewide could be disenfranchised this election over these “naked ballots.”
anonymous

U.S. senators question Amazon on concerns it tracks employees, limits unionization | Re... - 0 views

  • Four Democratic U.S. senators on Thursday sent a letter to Amazon.com Inc's AMZN.O Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, demanding answers over the company's alleged moves to track and monitor employees and limit unionization efforts.
  • discourage workers from organizing
  • it tracks workers who participate in strikes
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  • law firms Amazon contracts with for union avoidance
  • Amazon has decided to heavily invest in systems to retaliate against freedom of expression about unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, and to refer to organizing and workers’ rights mobilization efforts as threats against the company equal to those posed by hate groups and terrorism, is unacceptable
  • Amazon relies on extensive worker surveillance to boost employee output
  • Amazon said more than 19,000 of its U.S. frontline workers contracted the coronavirus this year, or 1.44% of the total
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