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How Billionaire Oligarchs Are Becoming Their Own Political Parties - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • In 2010, the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court effectively blew apart the McCain-Feingold restrictions on outside groups and their use of corporate and labor money in elections. That same year, a related ruling from a lower court made it easier for wealthy individuals to finance those groups to the bottom of their bank accounts if they so chose. What followed has been the most unbridled spending in elections since before Watergate. In 2000, outside groups spent $52 million on campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. By 2012, that number had increased to $1 billion.
  • The result was a massive power shift, from the party bosses to the rich individuals who ran the super PACs (as most of these new organizations came to be called). Almost overnight, traditional party functions — running TV commercials, setting up field operations, maintaining voter databases, even recruiting candidates — were being supplanted by outside groups.
  • With the advent of Citizens United, any players with the wherewithal, and there are surprisingly many of them, can start what are in essence their own political parties, built around pet causes or industries and backing politicians uniquely answerable to them. No longer do they have to buy into the system. Instead, they buy their own pieces of it outright, to use as they see fit. “Suddenly, we privatized politics,”
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  • Where does the money go? Americans for Prosperity obviously spends a lot on television, but it also maintains offices in 35 states with 600 paid staff members. The group funds phone banks, big-ticket events and many other details like beer cozies and water bottles. Its biggest chapter is in Florida, where its 50 paid staff members work out of 10 offices and constitute a year-round organization that rivals that of the state Republican Party.
  • the Koch brothers, whose own group, Americans for Prosperity, already has political operations in every state that Steyer is contesting, along with 28 others. The group says it will spend at least $125 million this year.
  • In 2012, it raised $115 million. It is impossible to know the identities of the donors, though the group’s annual closed-door conferences are regularly attended by many of the biggest conservative donors in the country, including the hedge-fund executive Foster Friess and the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
  • we have Michael Bloomberg, who has committed to spending $50 million to support gun-control legislation; his Independence USA PAC, meanwhile, is spending $25 million this fall to elect “centrists.” We have the TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts and his group Ending Spending, which has spent roughly $10 million so far this year to elect fiscal conservatives to Congress, an effort that has drawn support from the billionaire hedge-fund executive Paul E. Singer, who has also devoted tens of millions to Republican candidates who share his views on Israel. We have Mark Zuckerberg and his FWD.us, with a budget of about $50 million to push an immigration overhaul. In 2014, as of early October, when the campaigns had yet to do their big final pushes, overall spending was already more than $444 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Roughly $231 million was from the parties and their congressional committees, the rest from outside spending. The biggest chunk of that by far came from super PACs — more than $196 million.
  • the most important factor is the growth of the volunteer base of Americans for Prosperity, which it now numbers into the tens of thousands. The first lesson of party politics is that winning elections means getting out the vote, and getting out the vote means signing up volunteers. Phillips spends a lot of time thinking about what will keep them happy.
  • The movement is independent of the party, which is the way Phillips wants it. When Rick Scott said he would support an expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare, Americans for Prosperity let him know about its displeasure through a deluge of phone calls and letters and even a protest at the State Capitol. Scott ultimately made no effort to push it through the Legislature, many of whose Republican members have been supported by the group as well. “I think he started hearing from some other voices, A.F.P. and some of the other organizations,” Chris Hudson, the group’s Florida director, had said, “and I think they sort of superseded what was going on in his own staff.”
  • Phillips said the group’s volunteers would have it no other way. “They have to feel like the organization is genuinely a principled outfit,” he said. “If they think you’re just an appendage of the party, they can go to the party. Why do they need you?”Continue reading the main story
  • In 2012, though, Steyer read an essay in Rolling Stone (“Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math”), in which Bill McKibben, the writer and climate activist, suggested that fossil-fuel interests had too much money at stake to let the political system do anything about carbon emissions. The only alternative, McKibben wrote, was a mass movement, and the only way to start a mass movement was to articulate a consistent, fact-based moral argument for change. At that moment, Taylor said, “Tom realized that the climate threat was near, present, imminent, massive — and aggravates every other crisis, whether it’s hunger or civil rights.” He had to do something different. So a few months later he and Taylor invited McKibben to the ranch for a war council.
  • NextGen’s campaign largess was itself a capitulation to the post-Citizens United world. Steyer was applying pressure to the political system in a way no average American could. It seemed undemocratic. But Steyer saw it as simple pragmatism; the other side was “playing multiples,” he said, and he had to operate “in the real world the way the real world works.”
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Capitalism's Suffocating Music - 0 views

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shared by jlessner on 22 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • jlessner on 22 Oct 14
     
    Onstage before thousands of fans, Sam Smith sang "Stay With Me," beseeching his partner in a one-night stand for a few minutes more, and I half wondered if the two of them needed the extra time to finish bottles of Miller Lite, because a printed plug for the beer hovered over his head.
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The Donald and the Decider - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 22 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • the antiestablishment candidates now dominating the field, aside from being deeply ignorant about policy, have a habit of making false claims, then refusing to acknowledge error. Why don’t Republican voters seem to care?
  • part of the answer has to be that the party taught them not to care. Bluster and belligerence as substitutes for analysis, disdain for any kind of measured response, dismissal of inconvenient facts reported by the “liberal media” didn’t suddenly arrive on the Republican scene last summer. On the contrary, they have long been key elements of the party brand. So how are voters supposed to know where to draw the line?
  • the 2000 election, but during the campaign Republicans tried — largely successfully — to make the election about likability, not policy. George W. Bush was supposed to get your vote because he was someone you’d enjoy having a beer with, unlike that stiff, boring guy Al Gore with all his facts and figures.
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  • Then came 9/11, and the affable guy was repackaged as a war leader. But the repackaging was never framed in terms of substantive arguments over foreign policy. Instead, Mr. Bush and his handlers sold swagger. He was the man you could trust to keep us safe because he talked tough and dressed up as a fighter pilot. He proudly declared that he was the “decider” — and that he made his decisions based on his “gut.”
  • Mr. Gore was deemed to have lost debates, not because he was wrong, but because he was, reporters declared, snooty and superior, unlike the affably dishonest W.
  • The subtext was that real leaders don’t waste time on hard thinking, that listening to experts is a sign of weakness, that attitude is all you need
  • while Mr. Bush’s debacles in Iraq and New Orleans eventually ended America’s faith in his personal gut, the elevation of attitude over analysis only tightened its grip on his party, an evolution highlighted when John McCain, who once upon a time had a reputation for policy independence, chose the eminently unqualified Sarah Palin as his running mate.
  • Mr. Bush wasn’t articulating a notably different policy than what we’re now hearing from Trump et al; all he offered was belligerence with a thin veneer of respectability. Marco Rubio, who has succeeded him as the establishment favorite, is much the same, with a few added evasions
  • Why should anyone be surprised to see this posturing, er, trumped by the unapologetic belligerence offered by nonestablishment candidates?
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Will the Republican Party Survive the 2016 Election? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...419118 GOP conservatism tea party middle-class white election strategy
shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • In the 1996 presidential election, voter turnout had tumbled to the lowest level since the 1920s, less than 52 percent. Turnout rose slightly in November 2000. Then, suddenly: overdrive. In the presidential elections of 2004 and 2008, voter turnout spiked to levels not seen since before the voting age was lowered to 18, and in 2012 it dipped only a little. Voters were excited by a hailstorm of divisive events: the dot-com bust, the Bush-versus-Gore recount, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the bailouts and stimulus, and the Affordable Care Act.
  • Putnam was right that Americans were turning away from traditional sources of information. But that was because they were turning to new ones: first cable news channels and partisan political documentaries; then blogs and news aggregators like the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post; after that, and most decisively, social media.
  • Politics was becoming more central to Americans’ identities in the 21st century than it ever was in the 20th. Would you be upset if your child married a supporter of a different party from your own? In 1960, only 5 percent of Americans said yes. In 2010, a third of Democrats and half of Republicans did.
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  • Political identity has become so central because it has come to overlap with so many other aspects of identity: race, religion, lifestyle. In 1960, I wouldn’t have learned much about your politics if you told me that you hunted. Today, that hobby strongly suggests Republican loyalty. Unmarried? In 1960, that indicated little. Today, it predicts that you’re a Democrat, especially if you’re also a woman.
  • Meanwhile, the dividing line that used to be the most crucial of them all—class—has increasingly become a division within the parties, not between them.
  • Since 1984, nearly every Democratic presidential-primary race has ended as a contest between a “wine track” candidate who appealed to professionals (Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, and Barack Obama) and a “beer track” candidate who mobilized the remains of the old industrial working class (Walter Mondale, Dick Gephardt, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton).
  • The Republicans have their equivalent in the battles between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” candidates. Until this decade, however, both parties—and especially the historically more cohesive Republicans—managed to keep sufficient class peace to preserve party unity.
  • The Great Recession ended in the summer of 2009. Since then, the U.S. economy has been growing, but most incomes have not grown comparably. In 2014, real median household income remained almost $4,000 below the pre-recession level, and well below the level in 1999. The country has recovered from the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Most of its people have not. Many Republicans haven’t shared in the recovery and continued upward flight of their more affluent fellow partisans.
  • What was new and astonishing was the Trump boom. He jettisoned party orthodoxy on issues ranging from entitlement spending to foreign policy. He scoffed at trade agreements. He said rude things about Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. He reviled the campaign contributions of big donors—himself included!—as open and blatant favor-buying. Trump’s surge was a decisive repudiation by millions of Republican voters of the collective wisdom of their party elite.
  • It’s uncertain whether any Tea Partier ever really carried a placard that read keep your government hands off my medicare. But if so, that person wasn’t spouting gibberish. The Obama administration had laid hands on Medicare. It hoped to squeeze $500 billion out of the program from 2010 to 2020 to finance health insurance for the uninsured. You didn’t have to look up the figures to have a sense that many of the uninsured were noncitizens (20 percent), or that even more were foreign-born (27 percent). In the Tea Party’s angry town-hall meetings, this issue resonated perhaps more loudly than any other—the ultimate example of redistribution from a deserving “us” to an undeserving “them.”
  • As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
  • Owners of capital assets, employers of low-skill laborers, and highly compensated professionals tend to benefit economically from the arrival of immigrants. They are better positioned to enjoy the attractive cultural and social results of migration (more-interesting food!) and to protect themselves against the burdensome impacts (surges in non-English-proficient pupils in public schools). A pro-immigration policy shift was one more assertion of class interest in a party program already brimful of them.
  • The Republican National Committee made it all official in a March 2013 postelection report signed by party eminences. The report generally avoided policy recommendations, with a notable exception: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.
  • Republicans’ approval ratings slipped and slid. Instead of holding on to their base and adding Hispanics, Republicans alienated their base in return for no gains at all. By mid-2015, a majority of self-identified Republicans disapproved of their party’s congressional leadership
  • In 2011–12, the longest any of the “not Romneys” remained in first place was six weeks. In both cycles, resistance to the party favorite was concentrated among social and religious conservatives.
  • The closest study we have of the beliefs of Tea Party supporters, led by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, found that “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients. The distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘people who don’t work’ is fundamental to Tea Party ideology.”
  • Half of Trump’s supporters within the GOP had stopped their education at or before high-school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov. Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree. Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000. Only 11 percent earned more than $100,000.
  • Trump Republicans were not ideologically militant. Just 13 percent said they were very conservative; 19 percent described themselves as moderate. Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards.
  • What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and the intensity of their economic nationalism. Sixty-three percent of Trump supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on U.S. soil—a dozen points higher than the norm for all Republicans
  • More than other Republicans, Trump supporters distrusted Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged that the president was born in the United States, according to an August survey by the Democratic-oriented polling firm PPP. Sixty-six percent believed the president was a Muslim.
  • Trump promised to protect these voters’ pensions from their own party’s austerity. “We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.”
  • He promised to protect their children from being drawn into another war in the Middle East, this time in Syria. “If we’re going to have World War III,” he told The Washington Post in October, “it’s not going to be over Syria.” As for the politicians threatening to shoot down the Russian jets flying missions in Syria, “I won’t even call them hawks. I call them the fools.”
  • He promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had swayed so many Republican races of the past. “I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”
  • Trump has destroyed one elite-favored presidential candidacy, Scott Walker’s, and crippled two others, Jeb Bush’s and Chris Christie’s. He has thrown into disarray the party’s post-2012 comeback strategy, and pulled into the center of national discussion issues and constituencies long relegated to the margins.
  • Something has changed in American politics since the Great Recession. The old slogans ring hollow. The insurgent candidates are less absurd, the orthodox candidates more vulnerable. The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war.
  • there appear to be four paths the elite could follow, for this campaign season and beyond. They lead the party in very different directions.
  • Maybe the same message and platform would have worked fine if espoused by a fresher and livelier candidate. Such is the theory of Marco Rubio’s campaign. Or—even if the donor message and platform have troubles—maybe $100 million in negative ads can scorch any potential alternative, enabling the donor-backed candidate to win by default.
  • Yet even if the Republican donor elite can keep control of the party while doubling down, it’s doubtful that the tactic can ultimately win presidential elections.
  • The “change nothing but immigration” advice was a self-flattering fantasy from the start. Immigration is not the main reason Republican presidential candidates lose so badly among Latino and Asian American voters, and never was: Latino voters are more likely to list education and health care as issues that are extremely important to them. A majority of Asian Americans are non-Christian and susceptible to exclusion by sectarian religious themes.
  • Perhaps some concession to the disgruntled base is needed. That’s the theory of the Cruz campaign and—after a course correction—also of the Christie campaign. Instead of 2013’s “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Liberalization,” Cruz and Christie are urging “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Enforcement.”
  • Severed from a larger agenda, however—as Mitt Romney tried to sever the issue in 2012—immigration populism looks at best like pandering, and at worst like identity politics for white voters. In a society that is and always has been multiethnic and polyglot, any national party must compete more broadly than that.
  • Admittedly, this may be the most uncongenial thought of them all, but party elites could try to open more ideological space for the economic interests of the middle class. Make peace with universal health-insurance coverage: Mend Obamacare rather than end it. Cut taxes less at the top, and use the money to deliver more benefits to working families in the middle. Devise immigration policy to support wages, not undercut them. Worry more about regulations that artificially transfer wealth upward, and less about regulations that constrain financial speculation. Take seriously issues such as the length of commutes, nursing-home costs, and the anticompetitive practices that inflate college tuitio
  • Such a party would cut health-care costs by squeezing providers, not young beneficiaries. It would boost productivity by investing in hard infrastructure—bridges, airports, water-treatment plants. It would restore Dwight Eisenhower to the Republican pantheon alongside Ronald Reagan and emphasize the center in center-right
  • True, center-right conservative parties backed by broad multiethnic coalitions of the middle class have gained and exercised power in other English-speaking countries, even as Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 and 2012. But the most-influential voices in American conservatism reject the experience of their foreign counterparts as weak, unprincipled, and unnecessary.
  • “The filibuster used to be bad. Now it’s good.” So Fred Thompson, the late actor and former Republican senator, jokingly told an audience on a National Review cruise shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency for the first time. How partisans feel about process issues is notoriously related to what process would benefit them at any given moment.
  • There are metrics, after all, by which the post-2009 GOP appears to be a supremely successful political party. Recently, Rory Cooper, of the communications firm Purple Strategies, tallied a net gain to the Republicans of 69 seats in the House of Representatives, 13 seats in the Senate, 900-plus seats in state legislatures, and 12 governorships since Obama took office. With that kind of grip on state government, in particular, Republicans are well positioned to write election and voting rules that sustain their hold on the national legislature
  • Maybe the more natural condition of conservative parties is permanent defense—and where better to wage a long, grinding defensive campaign than in Congress and the statehouses? Maybe the presidency itself should be regarded as one of those things that is good to have but not a must-have, especially if obtaining it requires uncomfortable change
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Bob Woodward's 'Fear' Missed What Matters About Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • ear paints a damning picture of Trump the human being. Who will soon forget Trump’s derisive comment that H. R. McMaster—whose life of service to the United States crimped his clothing budget—“dressed like a beer salesman”? Yet in the end it offers a remarkably forgiving assessment of Trump the president. The Trump presidency without the corruption, without the Russia entanglement, without the racism, without the abuse of women is hardly recognizable as the Trump presidency at all.
  • Woodward approaches the Trump presidency as he has approached every other subject in his long and distinguished career. But the Trump presidency is something quite unlike anything anyone in Washington has seen before. Woodward’s access to the administration’s relatively normal figures—Cohn, Porter, Priebus, and their colleagues—actually erodes rather than enhances understanding of the administration’s actions. Their need to justify their own service to Trump compels them to minimize what Trump is and extenuate what he is doing. Woodward’s reliance upon them leads him to minimize and extenuate, too
  • If the only things we had to fear about the Trump administration were the stories told in Fear, Americans and the world could relax. Unfortunately, by relying on Trump’s enablers, America’s most legendary reporter has largely missed the biggest part of what they enabled.
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The Quiet Efforts to Battle Silicon Valley's Bro Culture - WSJ - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • It has been a little over a year since the #MeToo movement made it safer for women to speak out about the toxic aspects of workplaces in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Since then, many tech companies and venture-capital firms have begun developing internal policies and diversity initiatives that they hope will shake up a culture that was previously defined by the idea that the single white man with no obligations outside of work is the best kind of employee.
  • But it is becoming increasingly clear that the most profound cultural disruptions are happening in a subtle and less public way, influenced by the women in tech who are fed up with the status quo and want change to happen more quickly.
  • “We make sure the activities we do within the company and with the founders are gender-neutral,” Ms. Hebb says. “We aren’t doing whiskey drinking and shooting. We’ll do a scavenger hunt, or a hike, which is actually a better way to get to know people than over drinks. Is a scavenger hunt less bro-ey than drinks? It’s different, and we think that relates to a broader group of people who have felt excluded from a singular way of networking
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  • “Bro culture is a dynamic that’s been creating men-only environments in their most toxic form by encouraging bad behaviors, from excessive drinking to heavy sexualized talk, that excludes women and any person who doesn’t support those behaviors,” Ms. Cooper says.
  • She adds that it isn’t just women whom bro culture excludes. It’s anyone who doesn’t want to participate in these kinds of behaviors. “Very few people enjoy those things, but they don’t want to stand up to the popular crowd making the rules,” she says. “I like beer pong as much as the next person, but I don’t want to do it at work. “
  • Perhaps the biggest efforts involve separating work from alcohol. Stories abound in Silicon Valley about networking events that happen late into the night at alcohol- and drug-fueled parties
  • “Changing culture is all about these kinds of micro moments,” says Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab who has conducted research on troubling workplace behavior in the tech industry. “It is the micro moments that will become the macro and change the norms of professionalism.”
  • In 2017, Pipeline Angels announced an alcohol-free policy. It came about when Pipeline Angels’ founder, Natalia Oberti Noguera, attended a tech conference where the host announced an impromptu “drunk talk” on stage. It’s a fairly common tactic in Silicon Valley, with the idea being that a volunteer from the audience will drink a lot and then give a talk in the hopes that alcohol will make that person more vulnerable and more forthcoming.
  • “Do you know who volunteered to give the drunk talk? A white guy,” Ms. Oberti Noguera says. She didn’t see that as surprising given the potential reputational risks of getting drunk for someone other than a white man.
  • “We’re already vulnerable,” she says. “It’s not safe in terms of our reputation for a woman, a man of color or a nonbinary person to get drunk and give a drunk talk at a professional event. And so I thought I can take someone else’s mistake and make it a best practice. Now all our events, including meals and evening receptions, are alcohol-free.”
  • “Something like 90% of VC investors are men,” Ms. Nelson says. “Only 2% of VC dollars go to women. That’s the definition of bro culture—men supporting men, opening doors for one another and making those connections.”
  • “We’re opening doors for people that weren’t open before,” she says. “You can really have whatever kind of culture you want. It’s up to us to determine what that is.”
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Fraternities Are Feeding Anti-Semitism in Austria - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Like many Austrian fraternities, Germania zu Wiener Neustadt sometimes uses a songbook at its get-togethers. It looks ordinary enough, with its red cover, gold crest, and curling script. The cover is studded with metal nails called “Biernagel” that keep the book slightly elevated so it doesn’t get wet when lying in beer.Unlike most other songbooks, however, it contains lyrics about killing Jews. “Step on the gas,” one line reads. “We’ll manage the seventh million.”
  • The party had gotten negative press just two weeks earlier, when its minister of the interior proposed “concentrating refugees into camps.” The Jewish community of Vienna, where the majority of the country’s 12,000 to 15,000 Jews live, has been boycotting the FPÖ; it refused to participate in the government’s official Holocaust memorial ceremony last month.
  • Austria has many high school and university student associations. What makes these fraternities (“Burschenschaften”) unique is that they’re infused with German nationalism. They originated in German university towns in the first half of the 19th century and stood for a united German nation. During the Nazi era, the fraternities were merged with the Nazi students’ associations. They reemerged after the war. Today, not all members of these fraternities are far-right extremists, anti-Semites, or neo-Nazis; some are right-wing conservatives who adhere to old traditions, like a mask-free fencing ritual that often leaves members with scarred faces.
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  • This silence about the Nazi era has been typical of Austria for much of the 20th century, when the nation saw itself as the first victim of Hitler’s expansionist politics. In 1986, the Nazi past of former UN general secretary and presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim resulted in international pressure. Consequently, then-chancellor Franz Vranitzky acknowledged Austria’s complicity in the war and Nazi crimes in 1993.
  • Another far-right European party that has tried this strategy is France’s National Front. Founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who made statements offensive to both Jews and Muslims, the party was taken over in 2011 by his daughter Marine Le Pen. She expelled her father from the party and gave it a facelift, publicly embracing Jews while continuing to speak negatively about Muslims. In 2014, she told French Jews, “Not only is the National Front not your enemy, but it is without a doubt the best shield to protect you. It stands at your side for the defense of our freedoms of thought and of religion against the only real enemy, Islamist fundamentalism.”
  • Still, the FPÖ keeps framing scandals such as the songbooks as isolated cases, in its attempt to convince people that Jews are no longer the enemy of the party. Fraternities are clearly enmeshed with the FPÖ, which means that—despite all public claims to the contrary—the party will likely keep its ties to anti-Semitism intact.
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How Trump's Tariff Punch Hurt His Pro-Business Agenda - WSJ - 0 views

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shared by runlai_jiang on 04 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Markets fell after President Donald Trump announced planned tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, an effect that was exacerbated by what the move symbolizes fo
  • When a key economic input suddenly becomes scarce,  it’s called a supply shock: It pushes costs up and economic activity down.
  • This helps explain why markets have responded so badly to President Donald Trump’s announcement of a 25% tariff on steel imports and 10% on aluminum. Like a geopolitical shock that reduces the supply of oil, it’s bad for both inflation and growth.
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  • exacerbated by what the tariffs symbolize for Mr. Trump’s agenda and the broader global economy.
  • By following his nationalist instincts Mr. Trump has broken with the pro-business factions in his administration and his party whose policy priorities have been critical to the upswing in business and investor sentiment since he was elected. By willingly hurting U.S. allies over a problem of overcapacity that is mainly China’s doing, he’s cast further uncertainty over the U.S. role as global leader.
  • With investors already on edge about Federal Reserve interest rate increases, the steel tariffs at the margin compound inflation pressure. That effect is so far too small to alter the Fed’s calculus, but a tit-for-tat cycle of retaliation could lead to even more inflation and rate increases than investors or the Fed have anticipated.
  • Protectionism shrinks markets, raises costs, and reduces how fast a country can grow without generating inflation. U.S. steel and aluminum companies can meet the demand previously filled by imports, but with unemployment at a 17-year low that may require hiring workers away from other industries, putting upward pressure on wages.
  • This is good news in the short run for workers, but bad news for any consumer who must now pay more for cars or beer cans.
  • nvestors speculated that the angry reaction of American allies, in particular the European Union, showed U.S. global leadership is fading and with it the dollar’s appeal as a reserve currency.
  • China may move more quickly to curb its overcapacity, the root of the import surge and price pressure that is hurting U.S. producers. Yet the decision has generated conflict within his own administration, his party and with key U.S. allies that, at least at the margin, counteracts the boost from the rest of his agenda.
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Video reveals Steve Bannon links to Boris Johnson | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • On the day that article 50 was triggered, Nigel Farage was filmed with a pint of beer thanking them both. “Well done Bannon. Well done Breitbart. You helped with this. Hugely
  • Alison Klayman, the film-maker, said that Bannon had been “unequivocal” about his communications with Johnson. She also said that Bannon had met Farage, a close associate, several times during the same visit.
  • Klayman asks him if they’ve been speaking on the phone and he says: “Talked to him initially over the phone then it’s just easier to go back and forth on text. It’s just easier. I’ve been telling him one of my recommendations is that he gave one of the most important political speeches of 2016. Was his closing speech, a three-to-five-minute speech in June 2016, his closing argument on national TV for the Leave campaign ... And it was magnificent. “And all I was telling him all weekend was just to incorporate those themes. Those same themes. Basically, he was saying that June 23 was independence day for Great Britain. Their independence day being like our July 4.” Bannon adds: “This is the tee up, right. He’s back.” He then describes Johnson’s career, saying: “He wrote a really great book on Churchill. That’s one of the things I told him over the weekend.” Bannon says he got to know Johnson after the US presidential election when he was working as Donald Trump’s chief strategist. “Right after we won, Boris flew over. Because their victory was as unexpected as ours. I got to know him quite well in the transition period,” he said.
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  • The video is bound to raise further questions about Johnson’s openness and the extent to which he has relied on Bannon for advice at key stages in his bid for Downing Street
  • Bannon has described the far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – known as Tommy Robinson – as the “backbone” of Britain.
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Pregnant Covid-19 patient: 'Stop going out' | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ovid-19-patient-stop-going-out crisis
shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Struggling to breathe, a heavily pregnant British woman has pleaded with people to stop going out as she battles coronavirus in hospital.
  • Mannering, a beauty therapist from Herne Bay, Kent, is six and half months pregnant and found out after four days in hospital that she had tested positive for Covid-19.
  • In a video from her hospital bed she begged people to stay at home. “I’m telling you now, if you are going to meet your friend for a stupid beer or a sea walk because the weather is nice, you are going to take this home and you are going to kill someone, one of your family members.
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A Holy Week Amid a National Tribulation - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...tional-tribulation-11586474599 response pandemic psychology strategies role model stories
shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • “You did not come back from hell with empty hands,” said André Malraux to Whittaker Chambers after reading the galleys of “Witness.” None of us want to come back from this time without having gained some insight, some wisdom that we can use to gain greater purchase on reality.
  • A good resource in looking for societal wisdom is Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author, among other books, of “The Righteous Mind.”
  • “This is a time for us to reflect,” he said by phone, “and choose a better story. Right now stories are being rewritten all around us, nationally, individually, and we all get a chance to do some of the rewriting.”
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  • “The key concept everyone has to understand is hardship generally makes people stronger. Fear, challenge, threat—unless they are extreme—tend to produce growth, not damage.”
  • this could be a turning point for some of the young who have been “overprotected.” They are enduring “a giant shock and setbacks.” “This will make them experience, and deal. Many people will grow a lot from it.”
  • In a national emergency it becomes easier to fulfill the key human desire to be part of something—“to be part of Team Humanity, to be useful. That’s why it’s such a pleasure at 7 p.m. I hear the noise, we cheer, yell and bang pots” to honor New York’s health-care workers. “It’s a small thing, but it’s a chance to be part of something larger and know it.”
  • “Every society tells stories, and those stories involve good and evil, and these stories call us together.” They are stories about “moral leadership,” and they make clear that “we each of us get to provide it.”
  • He thinks this might be “the thing”: “It’s the end of a cycle, not the end of the world.” He hopes that in a shift “from I to we,” Americans may more deeply cultivate the virtues we need as a democracy, “which include the virtues of the Christian and Jewish traditions—humility, mercy. We are so quick to judge. We need to be easier on each other, turn down the judgment 80% or 90%.”
  • We are also as a society reminding ourselves of what we hold high—the selflessness of doctors and nurses, for instance
  • “If you want to come out of this crisis,” Mr. Haidt says, “discuss these things.”
  • “The key insight we’re getting is that video communication is surprisingly satisfying,” Mr. Haidt says. Social media connections in which you’re looking for “likes”? “That’s just managing your brand. But talking to someone face to face, if only on a screen, is really good. It isn’t a beer or a campfire, but when we’re starving, it’s good!”
  • “People are doing so much locally and at the state level, there could be a hope for a kind of civic renewal.”
  • he would always say at the end of his talks that if present trends continue we’re in trouble, “but present trends never continue. Something will happen to force this off the trajectory.”
  • By talking about these stories we teach the young what is admirable—this is who you want to be.
  • “The virus may do this. We have all been humbled by it, as a nation of institutions and of individuals, from the beginning.”
  • A friend this week quoted from Edward Achorn’s “Every Drop of Blood,” a study of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Mr. Achorn writes that Lincoln had come to think “it was time for Americans to stop thinking about self-righteousness. The only way forward was to recognize that all had been wrong and to treat each other with mercy.”
  • This tells us what bravery looks like, but also what a vocation is, and how a vocation is a spiritual event.
  • He is struck by “all the possibilities of heroism.”
  • What should we learn from this?
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North Korean diplomat in Pakistan suspected of bootlegging booze - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-41924487 politics culture policy alcohol
shared by anonymous on 09 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • A burglary at the residence of a North Korean diplomat in Pakistan has raised suspicion that the envoy might have been involved in large-scale booze bootlegging.
  • Alcohol is illegal for Muslims in Pakistan and hence hard to get. Diplomats, though, have permission for a personal allowance and there is a suspicion that some of their quota often ends up on the black market.
  • In early October, the residence of North Korean diplomat Hyon Ki-yong was broken into. He reported to the police that the burglars took off with two diamonds, several thousand US dollars, and a hefty hoard of liquor, beer and wine.
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  • A regular burglary would probably not be newsworthy. But this one involved alcohol - and lots of it. Again there are confusing reports but Reuters put the number well above 1,000 bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label - said to be worth about $80 each on the black market
  • Pakistan is a country where the majority-Muslim population is by law not allowed to drink alcohol. Some still drink, but alcohol is notoriously hard to come by. That has created a lucrative black market across the country.
  • This could mean two things: North Korean diplomats have been able to import a lot more than they are meant to and, unless they spend most of their days utterly drunk, they might have been selling the excess booze on the black market. North Korea's embassy has not commented on the allegations.
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Why history says Theresa May should go (opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html politics
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  • Why history says Theresa May should go
  • For the third time in two years, the British electorate has defied expectations.
  • Whether she steps down graciously or hobbles on until her government collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, she is not long for the leadership.
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Opinion | The Pandemic and the Future City - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cities-covid-remote-work.html
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  • In 1957 Isaac Asimov published “The Naked Sun,” a science-fiction novel about a society in which people live on isolated estates, their needs provided by robots and they interact only by video.
  • A decade ago many observers believed that both physical books and the bookstores that sold them were on the verge of extinction. And some of what they predicted came to pass: e-readers took a significant share of the market, and major bookstore chains took a significant financial hit.
  • The revival of cities won’t be entirely a pretty process; much of it will probably reflect the preferences of wealthy Americans who want big-city luxuries and glamour. “The main problem with moving to Florida is that you have to live in Florida,” one money manager told Bloomberg. But while cities thrive in part because they cater to the lifestyles of the rich and fatuous — like it or not, their wealth and power do a lot to shape the economy — cities also thrive because a lot of information-sharing and brainstorming takes place over coffee breaks and after-hours beers; Zoom calls aren’t an adequate substitute.
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The plan for post-pandemic life in England includes free testing and Covid certificates... - 0 views

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  • Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain offered a first detailed glimpse of what a post-pandemic society in England might look like on Monday, announcing free twice-weekly coronavirus tests and Covid status certificates that would allow people with immunity into crowded nightclubs and sporting events.
  • “I will be going to the pub myself and cautiously but irreversibly raising a pint of beer to my lips,” Mr. Johnson said at a news conference at 10 Downing Street, as he listed the next round of relaxed restrictions.
  • Trying to strike a balance between public health and personal liberties, he said Britain would design a system to certify the Covid status of anyone seeking to enter higher-risk settings.
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  • Britain has long resisted the idea of requiring people to carry identity documents, and for some in the country, this issue carries authoritarian overtones.
  • Mr. Johnson acknowledged the sensitivities and pointed out that the certification plan would not be rolled out for a few months. The government plans to test the program in pilot locations, from a comedy club and nightclub in Liverpool to the FA Cup soccer final at Wembley Stadium.
  • Britain plans to classify countries according to a traffic light system, with visitors from green countries not required to isolate themselves, visitors from amber countries required to isolate at home for several days, and those from red countries required to continue quarantining in hotels.
  • With more than 31 million people having gotten at least one vaccine “jab,” and the country still largely in lockdown, Britain has dramatically driven down its new cases, hospital admissions and deaths from the virus.
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There was war on Christmas, President Trump, waged by Christians called Puritans - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...tmas-trump-puritans-christians christmas war culture history
shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Here’s how it generally went down, according to Stephen Nissenbaum in his book “The Battle for Christmas.” On Christmas Day, the lower classes would dress up in strange costumes to “invert” their roles: Men would dress up as women, young boys as bishops, and the lowliest peasant or the town drunk might be declared the “Lord of Misrule.”
  • They would gather into a mob and go around to the houses and estates of the well-to-do, making a racket, singing bawdy songs and demanding entry. Amazingly, most of the time they were let in and given alcohol, food and even money. There was gambling and promiscuity (often leading to marriages at the end of the misrule). Once the mob was satisfied, it would move on to the next rich person’s estate.
  • If it seems surprising that rich people would willingly let a drunken mob in their homes and get them even drunker, that’s because the alternative was worse. If a homeowner tried to block entry, the mob would break in, destroy property, assault the homeowner, frighten his wife and children, and then take the food and drink anyway.
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  • the tradition served “as a kind of safety valve that contained class resentments within clearly defined limits,” and thus, ultimately reinforced the hierarchy.
  • Christmas misrule was largely tolerated. After all, the birth of Jesus had been tacked onto pagan traditions that had existed for centuries.
  • So a period of gorging and resting was almost written into the stars, and most pagan European cultures had a holiday for this. In fact, Romans had been celebrating Saturnalia — a similar celebration of social inversion and orgiastic gluttony — for much longer before that.
  • December meant three things in early Europe: The work of harvesting the year’s crops was done, the beer and wine they’d been brewing was ready to drink, and it was cold enough to slaughter animals without the meat going immediately bad. December was often the only time of year when people got to eat fresh meat.
  • Puritans were fully aware of the non-Christian roots of Christmas, and unlike the Anglican church, they were having none of it
  • During Puritan rule of England in the mid-1600s, they attempted to make it illegal, scheduling Parliament to meet on Dec. 25 and ordering a day of fasting and repentance. They were met with riots and insurrection.
  • The Puritan ban on Christmas lasted much longer in New England, on paper from 1659 to 1681. But even after English authorities overturned the ban, it was still culturally taboo for well over a century afterward.
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Trump, Biden and the Tough Guy, Nice Guy Politics of 2020 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mp-biden-masculinity-2020.html campaign US trump politics gop election Biden polls gender
shared by aidenborst on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Kindness. Humility. Responsibility. These traits were once “the definition of manliness,” Barack Obama told a crowd on Saturday, campaigning in Flint, Mich., for his former running mate, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
  • “It used to be being a man meant taking care of other people, not going around bragging,” Mr. Obama said.
  • n two days, Americans will take their shot, making a choice between two presidential candidates who resemble vastly different case studies in what a man, even in 2020, should do or be.
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  • “Ultimately, masculinity still matters, we’ve learned. It’s how candidates still try to prove they are the best candidate,” said Ms. Cooper. “And so, even in 2020, Democrats decided the safest bet to beat a white man in his 70s is another white man in his 70s.”
  • He has said he believes men who change diapers are “acting like the wife.” “Macho Man” is the song that plays at his rallies, even after the Village People objected. “He seeks to distinguish himself as the manliest — and thus, in his mind, the most-qualified — person to be president,” said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
  • On the other end of the spectrum, or perhaps somewhere in the middle, is Mr. Biden, a “Dad-like” figure, as the philosopher Kate Manne put it, who has vowed to be America’s protector through a dark period, with some combination of strength, empathy and compassion.
  • “He’s offering a more paternalistic type of masculinity, in that you can be a strong leader, but still be compassionate and empathetic,” said Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at Stanford University who studies gender and work.
  • On the one extreme is President Trump, who leaves little subtlety in his approach: Bragging about his sexual prowess, along with the size of his nuclear button, proclaiming “domination” over coronavirus and mocking his opponent for the size of his mask (“the biggest mask I’ve ever seen”), as if mask-wearing is somehow weak.
  • From Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan and right on through Mr. Trump, largely white, Christian, heterosexual presidential candidates have “performed” manhood in all sorts of ways: Donning hard hats and posing inside military tanks; battling over who would be the better guy to have a beer with; and implying their opponents were soft, weak, or “sleepy.”
  • “Michael Dukakis had a 17-point lead over Bush in the summer of 1988,” said Mr. Katz, whose book on presidential masculinity has been adapted into a documentary called “The Man Card.” “So what did they do? They relentlessly attacked his manhood. They suggested he was a failed protector, that he was ‘soft,’ that he wasn’t a ‘real man.’”
  • “I think the performance of masculinity means a lot,” he noted, “because it has the potential to eclipse all else.”
  • Girls receive a message that they “become” women — typically through a biological event like menstruation — while men are told throughout their lives to “be” men or to “man up,” as if masculinity is something that can be easily lost.“You don’t really say ‘be a woman’ the way you say ‘be a man’ or ‘man up,’” she said.Image
  • “Trump is the personification of this masculinity contest culture,” Ms. Cooper said. “It’s bad for organizations, it’s terrible for a country.”
  • Maybe women were always the intended audience for the contests. Whether that’s true, they seem to be ready to render a clear judgment. Mr. Biden is leading among women by as much as 20 points.
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U.K. Energy Price Cap to Rise 80%, Regulator Says - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uk-energy-price-cap.html energy costs response uk europe policy politics
shared by Javier E on 27 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • with leaders from London to Berlin mounting costly state interventions, it augurs a reversal of decades of liberalization in energy markets.
  • France has capped gas and electricity rates, subsidized the cost of gasoline and diesel fuel and spent 45 billion euros ($45 billion) to help hard-hit families.
  • Germany has moved to take command of its energy markets, subsidizing new liquefied gas import terminals and bailing out one of the largest utilities, Uniper,
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  • In Britain, where gas accounts for roughly 40 percent of electricity generation but has a disproportionate effect on its cost
  • if the price of beer had risen as much that of natural gas over the last year, a pint in a pub would cost £25, or about $30.
  • “How can you adapt to a rise like this?” said Tewdos Gebreysus, a 35-year-old Uber driver in London, who said he was now paying four times as much on his energy bills as he was at the beginning of the year.
  • Johnson has left it for his successor to devise a response to the skyrocketing energy costs.
  • She and her opponent, Rishi Sunak, reject more sweeping measures, like using state subsidies to freeze the energy price cap for two years.
  • “We have a sort of worst-of-both-worlds system,” said Jonathan Portes, a professor of a professor of economics and public policy at Kings College London. “Household prices are related to the spot market, and we sort of save up price increases and dump them on households all at once.”
  • Britain is far less dependent on Russian gas than Germany or other European countries. But the structure of its energy market makes it extremely sensitive to fluctuations in the market price of natural gas.
  • The Bank of England has predicted that inflation will peak at 13 percent in October as the new energy prices turn up in household bills. Other estimates are higher; analysts at Citibank have said the rate could reach as high as 18 percent early next year.
  • Britain’s opposition Labour Party recently proposed to freeze energy tariffs where they are now, paying part of the £29 billion cost by increasing the so-called windfall taxes that the Conservative government imposed this year on oil and gas giants operating in the North Sea
  • The leadership contest has been dominated by Ms. Truss’s promise to cut taxes, which is popular with the rank-and-file Conservative Party members who will vote for the next prime minister. But economists say it would do little to protect the most vulnerable people from the ravages of soaring energy bills.
  • With another hefty price increase looming in October, the public outcry over energy costs is likely to haunt the next prime minister. Unless the government develops an effective response, some analysts said, the issue could cripple the government and tilt the next election to the Labour Party.
  • at a campaign gathering with Mr. Sunak on Thursday, she said the solution to the crisis was not to throw more money carelessly at consumers. Mr. Sunak, who has proposed cutting value-added tax on energy bills, warned that without drastic action, “there’s a high risk that millions of people will fall into destitution.
  • Beyond the mechanics of the system, critics said Britain had lagged Germany and other European countries in urging people to reduce energy consumption and increase the efficiency of their homes and offices.
  • “This is the poverty of our politics,” said Tom Burke, the chairman of E3G, an environmental think tank, and a former government adviser. “You’ve got to do some financial work to address the costs in the short term, and then you’ve got to really drive forward on demand reduction in the long run.”
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