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Javier E

The Final Insult in the Bush-Cheney Marriage - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-the-bush-cheney-marriage.html

Bush presidency history vice-president

shared by Javier E on 12 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Over the course of conducting hundreds of interviews with key players in the Bush White House, including Cheney, and examining thousands of pages of never-released notes, memos and other internal documents, I came to see a relationship that differs substantially from the commonly accepted narrative. Even in the early days, when a young, untested president relied on the advice of his seasoned No. 2, Cheney was hardly the puppeteer that critics imagined. To the extent that the vice president exerted outsize influence in the first term, he became more marginalized over the course of the second, as Bush sought new paths to right his troubled presidency.
  • Some Bush advisers objected even to the word “partnership,” since that implied equality. Cheney said he never forgot that he was the vice president, and by all accounts he made a point of showing deference to Bush. While Bush called him “Dick,” Cheney always called Bush “Mr. President” and with others referred to him as “the Man.” (Karl Rove, though, reportedly referred to Cheney as “Management” — as in, “Better check with Management” — suggesting an influence not generally associated with vice presidents.)
  • Cheney is just five years older than Bush, but he carried himself with the gravitas of a much more experienced man, and the president treated him with more respect than anyone else in the inner circle. In any meeting, though, it was clear who was in charge
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  • Cheney was unquestionably the most influential vice president in American history, but that influence was in large part a function of his deference, as much as any overt exertion of power. Because he had no aspiration to ever run for president himself, he was able to focus on making Bush’s presidency successful — though on terms that he helped define.
  • Only by the end of his sixth year did Bush finally conclude that Rumsfeld had to go, a decision that represented the most fundamental break with Cheney, who was informed, not consulted. “It wasn’t open for discussion by the time he came to me,” Cheney told me. Cheney managed to preserve much of the national-security architecture he helped create, but he was now on defense more than offense, fending off changes that he thought would weaken the country or unravel the policies he had urged.
  • Cheney operated in tandem with Donald Rumsfeld, his longtime mentor who gave him his first White House job under Richard Nixon and was now serving as defense secretary. Together, they shared a vision of a world of threats that required a strong executive branch and an unapologetic assertion of American power. “He never came over to me and organized against some decision or said we have to marshal support for this or that,” Rumsfeld later told me. But he never had to. They were almost always on the same page, executing the same vision.
  • Bush moved away from Cheney and turned increasingly toward Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who supplanted Cheney as the president’s most influential lieutenant. No one in the White House had the relationship with Bush that Rice had. She worked out with him, talked sports with him, dined with him and Laura in the residence and spent weekends with them at Camp David.
  • When asked in 2002 how many times he had met privately with Bush, Cheney reached into his suit pocket and pulled out his schedule. “Let me see,” he said. “Three, four, five, six, seven — seven times.” Then he added: “Today.”
  • The passage of time has tempered some of the harsh judgments of Bush’s administration. By this past summer, 49 percent of Americans now viewed him favorably, compared with 46 percent who disapproved, the first positive balance in eight years.
Javier E

Texans Stick With Cruz Despite Defeat in Washington - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pite-defeat-in-washington.html

Texas politics

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • “Texas is not America,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican political consultant in Austin and the former spokesman for Mr. Cruz’s Republican predecessor in the Senate, Kay Bailey Hutchison. “It’s in America, but it’s not America. National polls don’t mean anything. Democrats haven’t won a statewide office in Texas since 1994. There are no Peter Kings in Texas.”
  • the fact that Mr. Cruz and House Republicans lost their fight with the White House over Mr. Obama’s health care law was a side issue. What mattered, they said, was that Mr. Cruz, who had campaigned on shaking up the status quo in Washington, had fulfilled his promise. From local party leaders to county commissioners to Tea Party members, Mr. Cruz was praised for his courage.
  • The doubts from Texas Republicans invariably play out behind closed doors. They do not fear Mr. Cruz’s personal wrath, but that of his supporters and the possibility of a primary fight if they criticize him. Mr. Cruz won his Senate seat by defeating one of the most powerful Republicans in Texas, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, a victory that exposed the ideological split between moderate establishment Republicans and the younger, more aggressive and conservative movement of grass-roots activists and Tea Party supporters.
Javier E

ZPM Espresso and the Rage of the Jilted Crowdfunder - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...of-the-jilted-crowdfunder.html

crowdsourcing startup financing

shared by Javier E on 02 May 15 - No Cached
  • The rancor is due, perhaps, to a fundamental confusion about what crowdfunding really is. On one hand, a backer is not a customer, because the product does not exist yet and may never
  • On the other hand, though, neither is a backer an investor, even if many of ZPM’s backers insisted they be treated as such. A Kickstarter pledge does not buy a portion of a company. Backers do not sit on the board; they are not enfranchised to review the company’s audited financials. Investors’ interests, at least ideally, are aligned with those of the company, whereas nothing in the crowdfunding relationship ties a backer to the company for the long term. Moreover, the last thing Kickstarter wants to deal with is S.E.C. regulations.
  • Kickstarter’s founders hardly imagined that a situation like this would arise. Neither was a technologist — Perry Chen, now 38, was an artist and gallerist, and Yancey Strickler, 36, was a music journalist — and although several of their recent hires have engineering backgrounds, they continue to see Kickstarter as something of an arts institution
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  • it wasn’t until 2010, when the founders were faced with an iPhone tripod proposal, that they had to decide if such commercial projects qualified as “creative” in the way they intended. As Strickler remembers it, the tripod’s creators responded that their particular tools happened to be injection molding and AutoCAD software, but that their enterprise was absolutely in the spirit of the platform. Kickstarter agreed to host the project, but that decision inspired a sustained effort to shape best practices for gadget campaigns. Its new rules included a requirement that there be a working prototype, and a prohibition on fancy computer renderings
  • Until last October, Kickstarter’s terms of use stipulated that project creators had only two options to discharge their obligations: ship or refund
  • Today, in response to situations like ZPM’s, creators can refund, ship or explain, and if a full audit — financial or narrative — shows that the creators have made “every reasonable effort” toward a decent outcome, the backers are encouraged to feel satisfied. Strickler told me he feels it undermines the whole concept of crowdfunding to guarantee that products will be delivered or that refund money will be held in escrow; the acceptance of some risk, after all, is an integral part of patronage
  • Ethan Mollick, who has published several papers on crowdfunding, has found that more than 80 percent of hardware projects ship with significant delays. Most of those do ultimately deliver something, but Mollick has found that 14 percent of the projects studied have, since 2012, shipped either nothing at all or something too shoddy to use
  • If backers lack an absolute right to a product, and their legal options are limited, the policy only heightens their feeling of entitlement to full disclosure. “I long ago gave up on getting a machine, but I want my $250 of information,”
  • A chief tenet of the Internet age is belief in the natural proliferation of democracy and decentralization, in the ability of distributed networks of everyday people to achieve what once required top-down hierarchies and a great concentration of power. When you contribute to a Kickstarter campaign that funds an album or a documentary, you’re participating in the creation of cultural value outside the risk-averse bureaucracies of mass cultural production. You’re kicking in to cut out the middlemen of music labels or Hollywood studios.
  • Projects like the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset or the Pebble watch (both of which were Kickstarter successes that went on to become big independent businesses; the former was acquired last year by Facebook for $2 billion) course with a special energy that derives from the exchange of far-flung resources among the sympathetic and like-minded. The realized object takes on a kind of totemic significance through the aspirations and the values of the community that brought it into being
  • At the same time, like all 21st-century consumers, Kickstarter backers have been trained to expect a world custom-engineered for total frictionlessness. Everything is supposed to work easily, right away and well. O
  • manufacturing remains a supremely difficult process, the success of which continues to rely on marshaling a lot of resources: development money, an extensive network of trusted vendors, the dedicated personnel to sit in conference rooms in concrete campuses in Shenzhen and Dongguan and refuse to budge until the product is streaming off the assembly line in the right amounts, at the right quality and at the agreed-upon price.
  • the advice became overwhelming. “They’re doing it on their own schedule, nights and weekends, taking up a huge amount of Igor’s time when he’s got a ton of work to do,” she said. “People got insulted because they couldn’t be involved as much as they wanted.”
  • The ongoing calls for transparency put pressure on ZPM to carry on all of its business in public, but transparency and efficacy can be incommensurable ideals. ZPM couldn’t blame its vendors in updates, even for the mistakes they were consistently making, if the company wanted to keep working with them — or with anyone at all. The backers had a hard time understanding this; they continued to operate under the shared assumption that more demo­cracy, more engagement and more transparency lead inexorably to more success.
  • ZPM also could not publish a full financial audit, because open books make meaningful cost negotiation impossible. “I just can’t publish our financials, our cost breakdown,” Tambasco said. “If I do that then when I go to get this thing made, then everybody knows how much I have in the bank. Then what they’re going to do is just drain that money.”Which is exactly what happened.
  • When one of those consultants demanded, in the spring of 2014, that the project act like a “real start-up” and go into what people in Silicon Valley often call “stealth mode,” the updates came to an abrupt halt. The founders hoped that by posting their email addresses and phone numbers, and offering to field queries and complaints in person, they might assuage the backer community, but this plan, in hindsight, seemed misbegotten. It only confirmed for the backers that their one plank of accountability — the public nature of the story on offer — had been withdrawn.
  • the reality of ZPM’s failure was pretty banal: The founders were naïve and inexperienced, well intentioned but clumsy, and they serially trusted and paid the wrong people for ineffective help.
  • The backers suspected that Polyakov would try to sell the intellectual property and pocket the proceeds, but in fact Polyakov’s total asking price for the company was $35,000 to settle the founders’ legal and professional debts, equity consideration for their angel investors and, most important, a guarantee that Buckman would honor ZPM’s commitment to its backers.
Javier E

The Influence of Fiorina at Lucent, in Hindsight - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...na-at-lucent-in-hindsight.html

election 2016 GOP candidate

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • her celebrated tenure at Lucent has been clouded by what happened two years after she left in 1999. The once-highflying business worth more than $250 billion at its peak nearly collapsed in the face of an accounting scandal and the telecommunications bust. The company laid off 50,000 employees in 2001 alone. Today the company, after merging with Alcatel of France, is worth only about $10 billion.
  • Lucent, like some its rivals, artificially burnished its financial performance through vendor financing — lending money to customers so they could buy its products. In 2004, the company settled charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission that accused it of perpetrating a $1.1 billion accounting fraud.
  • “It’s unlikely she would have been considered for the HP job once it became clear that Lucent’s success had more to do with loose credit terms and creative accounting than any reinvention of the company as the Second Coming of Cisco,”
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  • Scott Woolley of Fortune magazine wrote a deeply reported story in 2010 during Ms. Fiorina’s unsuccessful Senate campaign in California that detailed a questionable deal she championed. Mr. Woolley focused on a vendor-financed transaction with a small company, PathNet, a sale that was valued at as much as $2.1 billion, though PathNet had only $1.6 million in annual revenue. It later filed for bankruptcy.
  • While Mrs. Fiorina wasn’t responsible for the accounting fraud — she was never accused of being involved in any financial shenanigans — she did work with, and helped support, some of the employees who came under legal scrutiny for acts that took place after she left. One of those executives was Nina Aversano, a senior executive at Lucent who played a role in the company’s aggressive sales and accounting tactics. Mrs. Fiorina, somewhat famously inside of Lucent, literally kissed the feet of Ms. Aversano on stage in front of hundreds of employees after a particularly good quarter.
  • Ms. Endlich Heffernan’s book connects Mrs. Fiorina to two other failures while she was at Lucent. In one, Mrs. Fiorina was assigned to run Lucent’s consumer products business. Perhaps that division was always destined for failure — it included Lucent’s handset business just as the world was pivoting to mobile communications. But Mrs. Fiorina orchestrated a joint venture with the Dutch electronics giant Philips Electronics that turned out to be a mess, one that she later told The Wall Street Journal was the biggest mistake of her career.
  • Then there was Lucent’s 1999 acquisition of Ascend Communications for more than $22 billion. That deal may go down in history as one of the worst. Again, however, Mrs. Fiorina wasn’t in charge at Lucent. Was she consulted on the transaction? Yes. But she didn’t try to object to it.
  • Donald Trump was right when he said during the debate last week: “You know, if you look at what happened at Lucent under her tenure, it was not a good picture.”
Javier E

Work Policies May Be Kinder, but Brutal Competition Isn't - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-brutal-competition-isnt.html

workplace amazon lifestyle competition culture economics

shared by Javier E on 18 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • a closer look at the forces that drive the relentless pace at elite companies suggests that — however much the most sought-after employers in the country may be changing their official policies — brutal competition remains an inescapable component of workers’ daily lives. In some ways it’s getting worse.
  • the basic problem is that the rewards for ascending to top jobs at companies like Netflix and Goldman Sachs are not just enormous, they are also substantially greater than at companies in the next tier down. As a result, far more people are interested in these jobs than there are available slots, leading to the brutal competition
  • Grueling competition remains perhaps the defining feature of the upper echelon in today’s white-collar workplace.
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  • If anything, analysts point out, Amazon offers at least one major advantage over many other companies, which is that its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, has created a culture in which employees typically know exactly where they stand. “It’s a super attention-rich environment,” said Marcus Buckingham, an author and founder of the firm TMBC, which advises large companies on employee evaluation and performance. “There’s a lot of critical attention. They’re almost never ignored.”
  • The legal profession, one of the most brutal when it comes to pace and time commitment, illuminates the economic logic of a system where a large initial cohort of workers is gradually culled until only a small fraction are left.
  • The so-called Cravath system, named after the prestigious New York law firm known today as Cravath, Swaine & Moore, began to be put in place in the early 20th century. The firm and its imitators hired a large class of entry-level associates from the top law schools in the country, then relentlessly sifted them out over a period of several years, at the end of which only the most brilliant and productive — historically about one in 10 or 15 — became partners.
  • Those who did not make partner got first-rate legal training along the way, though, and were almost always able to land respectable jobs at lesser firms or as in-house corporate lawyers. For Cravath, it was also a plus: The partners made good money billing out its associates at top-of-market rates.
  • The thinning process even has its own name among scholars of law firms: the tournament.
  • Variations on the tournament are also the norm at elite management consulting firms and investment banks.
  • in many cases, many of the overachievers who are candidates for upper management at companies like Amazon welcome the breakneck pace and unyielding expectations. They just want to know that the system will be meritocratic. “We don’t mind competition,” he said. “We mind unfair competition.”
  • But there are some signs of change, as more and more young highly credentialed workers acknowledge that they can’t fulfill their responsibilities as husbands, wives, parents and friends while ascending through their organizations.
  • As in previous decades, the legal profession may hint at what’s to come. Alternative work arrangements are proliferating, and many previously elite firms are finding they no longer have the profits or the partnership slots to make the Cravath system work, abandoning the field of play to only a tiny number of ultrasuccessful firms.
  • “Amazon is at the top of the food chain,” Professor Henderson said. “Maybe they can get away with it. But most firms can’t rank and yank.”
Javier E

Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-in-a-bruising-workplace.html

amazon lifestyle career workplace

shared by Javier E on 18 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)
  • The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,”
  • his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”
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  • Last month, it eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the country, with a market valuation of $250 billion, and Forbes deemed Mr. Bezos the fifth-wealthiest person on earth.
  • Others who cycled in and out of the company said that what they learned in their brief stints helped their careers take off. And more than a few who fled said they later realized they had become addicted to Amazon’s way of working.
  • Amazon may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.
  • “Organizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executioner’s blade,”
  • At its best, some employees said, Amazon can feel like the Bezos vision come to life, a place willing to embrace risk and strengthen ideas by stress test. Employees often say their co-workers are the sharpest, most committed colleagues they have ever met, taking to heart instructions in the leadership principles like “never settle” and “no task is beneath them.”
  • In contrast to companies where declarations about their philosophy amount to vague platitudes, Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used in hiring, cited at meetings and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime
  • “You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three,” Mr. Bezos wrote in his 1997 letter to shareholders
  • mazon, though, offers no pretense that catering to employees is a priority. Compensation
  • As the company has grown, Mr. Bezos has become more committed to his original ideas, viewing them in almost moral terms, those who have worked closely with him say. “My main job today: I work hard at helping to maintain the culture,”
  • perhaps the most distinctive is his belief that harmony is often overvalued in the workplace — that it can stifle honest critique and encourage polite praise for flawed ideas. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to “disagree and commit” (
  • According to early executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost from the moment he founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped businesses over time — bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared.
  • Every aspect of the Amazon system amplifies the others to motivate and discipline the company’s marketers, engineers and finance specialists: the leadership principles; rigorous, continuing feedback on performance; and the competition among peers who fear missing a potential problem or improvement and race to answer an email before anyone else.
  • But in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more. “The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff,” said Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer.
  • As the newcomers acclimate, they often feel dazzled, flattered and intimidated by how much responsibility the company puts on their shoulders and how directly Amazon links their performance to the success of their assigned projects
  • Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.
  • many others said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being “vocally self-critical” is included in the description of the leadership principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel like an insatiable taskmaster.
  • A 2013 survey by PayScale, a salary analysis firm, put the median employee tenure at one year, among the briefest in the Fortune 500
  • To prod employees, Amazon has a powerful lever: more data than any retail operation in history. Its perpetual flow of real-time, ultradetailed metrics allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers do:
  • Amazon employees are held accountable for a staggering array of metrics, a process that unfolds in what can be anxiety-provoking sessions called business reviews, held weekly or monthly among various teams. A day or two before the meetings, employees receive printouts, sometimes up to 50 or 60 pages long, several workers said. At the reviews, employees are cold-called and pop-quizzed on any one of those thousands of numbers.
  • Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.
  • many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue
  • The rivalries at Amazon extend beyond behind-the-back comments. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat
  • Resources are sometimes hoarded. That includes promising job candidates, who are especially precious at a company with a high number of open positions. To get new team members, one veteran said, sometimes “you drown someone in the deep end of the pool,” then take his or her subordinates. Ideas are critiqued so harshly in meetings at times that some workers fear speaking up.
  • David Loftesness, a senior developer, said he admired the customer focus but could not tolerate the hostile language used in many meetings, a comment echoed by many others.
  • Each year, the internal competition culminates at an extended semi-open tournament called an Organization Level Review, where managers debate subordinates’ rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the wall. In recent years, other large companies, including Microsoft, General Electric and Accenture Consulting, have dropped the practice — often called stack ranking, or “rank and yank” — in part because it can force managers to get rid of valuable talent just to meet quotas.
  • Molly Jay, an early member of the Kindle team, said she received high ratings for years. But when she began traveling to care for her father, who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and weekends, her status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a less pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was “a problem.” As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him and never returned to Amazon.
  • “When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.
  • A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”
  • A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.
  • Amazon retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two years.
  • In interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork them. A
  • “One time I didn’t sleep for four days straight,” said Dina Vaccari, who joined in 2008 to sell Amazon gift cards to other companies and once used her own money, without asking for approval, to pay a freelancer in India to enter data so she could get more done. “These businesses were my babies, and I did whatever I could to make them successful.”
  • Recruiters, though, also say that other businesses are sometimes cautious about bringing in Amazon workers, because they have been trained to be so combative. The derisive local nickname for Amazon employees is “Amholes” — pugnacious and work-obsessed.
  • By the time the dust settles in three years, Amazon will have enough space for 50,000 employees or so, more than triple what it had as recently as 2013.
  • just as Jeff Bezos was able to see the future of e-commerce before anyone else, she added, he was able to envision a new kind of workplace: fluid but tough, with employees staying only a short time and employers demanding the maximum.
  • “Amazon is driven by data,” said Ms. Pearce, who now runs her own Seattle software company, which is well stocked with ex-Amazonians. “It will only change if the data says it must — when the entire way of hiring and working and firing stops making economic sense.”
Javier E

John Roberts, the Umpire in Chief - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...berts-the-umpire-in-chief.html

interpretation legal judicial theory constitutionality supreme court

shared by Javier E on 29 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The Roberts-Scalia debate is part of a longstanding argument about how judges should interpret laws passed by Congress.
  • the chief justice embraces an approach called “purposivism,” while Justice Scalia prefers “textualism.”
  • In Judge Katzmann’s account, purposivism has been the approach favored for most of American history by conservative and liberal judges, senators, and representatives, as well as administrative agencies. Purposivism holds that judges shouldn’t confine themselves to the words of a law but should try to discern Congress’s broader purposes.
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  • In the 1980s, when he was a lower court judge, Justice Scalia began to champion a competing view of statutory interpretation, textualism, which holds that judges should confine themselves to interpreting the words that Congress chose without trying to discern Congress’s broader purposes.
  • Textualism, in this view, promises to constrain judicial activism by preventing judges from roving through legislative history in search of evidence that supports their own policy preferences. But in the view of its critics, like Chief Judge Katzmann, textualism “increases the probability that a judge will construe a law in a manner that the legislators did not intend.”
  • Judge Katzmann, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, also accuses Justice Scalia of inconsistency for consulting the intent of the framers in the case of constitutional interpretation but not statutory interpretation.
  • The chief justice’s embrace of bipartisan judicial restraint in the second Affordable Care Act case was consistent with his embrace of the same philosophy in the first Affordable Care Act case in 2012, where he quoted one of his heroes, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr: “The rule is settled that as between two possible interpretations of a statute, by one of which it would be unconstitutional and by the other valid, our plain duty is to adopt that which will save the Act.”
  • Chief Justice Roberts was not, as Justice Scalia charged, rewriting the law. Instead he was advancing the view that he championed soon after his confirmation: In a polarized age, it is important for the Supreme Court to maintain its institutional legitimacy by deferring to the political branches.
  • Chief Justice Roberts’s relatively consistent embrace of judicial deference to democratic decisions supports his statement during his confirmation hearings that judges should be like umpires calling “balls and strikes.” As he put it then: “Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.”
Javier E

Defending Obama's 'Dithering' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...in-defense-of-dithering

presidency decision-making Obama

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • A poll just published by Reuters/Ipsos found 48 percent of respondents describing Obama’s military leadership as “cautious and consultative.” Another 36 percent chose “indecisive and dithering.”
Javier E

Making Change Happen, on a Deadline - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ng-change-happen-on-a-deadline

change deadline motivation politics economics

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • what’s missing to turn poor places into rich places isn’t more information, money, technology, workshops, programs, evaluation or any of the other things that development organizations normally provide.  What’s missing are motivation and confidence.
  • What Matta means is that usually the obstacle to development is not that we don’t have the tools, but that we don’t use the tools we have. People drag their feet. The next step is someone else’s problem.  Budget approval takes forever.  The money disappears.  People won’t try because it never works.  The goal is too pie-in-the-sky. The parts aren’t available.  The bricks get stolen.  The project gets started and then the leadership changes and it sits, abandoned.   Every villager fumes:  nothing gets done around here.
  • “The biggest issue is that people don’t actually mobilize,” said Matta.  “The last mile is where solutions need to come together in specific ways.   We think we have part of the answer to the last mile problem.”
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  • Who can accomplish something significant in three months?   But this is exactly the point — it takes a project out of the realm of business as usual.
  • Rapid Results was designed to help large corporations.   It was invented about 40 years ago by Robert Schaffer, a management consultant.  Five years ago, Schaffer’s company spun off a group as a nonprofit to train people all around the world to use the same method.   Rapid Results has spread, well, rapidly, because it has a champion in the World Bank, which is teaching people to use the method in various countries.
  • A trained facilitator sits down with people in a business, organization or village to decide on what to do.  They vote.  Now, if we had some money from the government or the World Bank — say, $5,000 or perhaps $30,000 — how could we spend it to accomplish that goal in just 100 days?  The village chooses its goal and how to get it done. The facilitator only talks about what other villages have accomplished in 100 days.
  • Rapid Results initiatives are a “bite-sized approach to complex problem-solving.  Communities will get confidence to tackle problems that may seem insurmountable.”  The tight deadline “forces a degree of prioritization and focus which leads to results,
  • The deadline creates an ethos of doing whatever it takes.  People aren’t sitting and waiting for the district official to come out.   They go buy the materials themselves.  Women sleep on the bulk cement bags to make sure no one steals them. A village in Sudan needed bricks for a school, and the contractor wasn’t producing enough.  So the Rapid Results team organized a competition in the community to make bricks, and the project stayed on schedule.
Javier E

The Education of Peter Drucker - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...4484

Drucker economic culture capitalism fascism market writing

shared by Javier E on 20 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • "Since I was twenty," Drucker wrote at eighty-two, "writing has been the foundation of everything I have been doing." From the first he showed a mastery of modern English prose. He has that rarest quality in a writer of non-fiction—a voice, a characteristic way of saying.
  • Economic Man limns a crisis of belief in capitalism (and socialism), the causes of which have yet to be ameliorated. Ignoring its specifically European causes, Drucker focuses on the civilizational causes of fascism. We live in that same civilization.
  • Drucker asserted in the book that Economic Man's promise—that a society built around the market (the major social institution of the nineteenth century) could achieve "freedom and justice through economic development"—had failed, and that this had "destroyed the belief in capitalism as a social system." The Great War and the Depression made this crisis of belief a reality for millions. "These catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable laws.
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  • In place of a market society, fascism sought to offer a "non-economic society," with non-economic incentives and satisfactions.
  • From that book forward Drucker has stressed the need for a strong non-economic society to make "inequality appear far less intolerable" and to shore people up against the bottom-line nihilism of the market. His work as a consultant to nonprofit organizations has been in furtherance of that goal. An anti-Utopian, he believed that "the bearable society" is the best we can achieve. Churches and secular voluntary organizations help men and women cope with the meaninglessness of much modern work.
Javier E

For Stanford Class of '94, a Gender Gap More Powerful Than the Internet - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gender-gaps-stanford-94.html

stanford gender entrepreneur silicon valley sexism boom internet

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • “The Internet was supposed to be the great equalizer,” said Gina Bianchini, the woman who had appeared on the cover of Fortune. “So why hasn’t our generation of women moved the needle?”
  • identity politics pushed many people into homogeneous groups; Scott Walker, one of the only African-Americans in the class to try founding a start-up, said in an interview that he regretted spending so much time at his all-black fraternity, which took him away from the white friends from freshman year who went on to found and then invest in technology companies.
  • But there were still many hoops women had greater trouble jumping through — components that had to be custom-built, capital that needed to be secured from a small number of mostly male-run venture firms.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • But with the web, “all of the sudden we began moving to a market where first mover advantage became enormous,” he said. Connection speeds were growing faster, Americans were starting to shop online, and multiplying e-commerce sites fought gladiatorial battles to control most every area of spending.
  • If the dawn of the start-up era meant that consumer-oriented ideas were becoming more important than proprietary technology, he asked himself aloud, shouldn’t more women have flooded in?
  • “The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong,” he added. “The more diverse the early group, the harder it is for people to find common ground.”
  • David Sacks, on the other hand, was unmarried and unencumbered, and in 1999 he left politics, his law degree and a job at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company to join his Stanford Review friends at a technology start-up, because of “the desire to live on the edge, to fight an epic battle, to experience in a very diluted way what previous generations must have felt as they prepared to go to war,” he wrote at the time. For his generation, he wrote, “instead of violence, unbridled capitalism has become the preferred vehicle for channeling their energy, intellect and aggression.”
  • his lack of social grace became an asset, according to Mr. Thiel and other former colleagues. He did not waste time on meetings that seemed pointless, and he bluntly insisted that the engineers whittle an eight-page PayPal registration process down to one.
  • But those debates did a great deal for Mr. Sacks. After graduation, he and Mr. Thiel published “The Diversity Myth,” a book-length critique of Stanford’s efforts. Within a few more years, he, Mr. Thiel, Mr. Rabois and others had transformed themselves into a close-knit network of technology entrepreneurs — innovators who created billion-dollar business after billion-dollar business, using the ideas, ethos and group bonds they had honed at The Stanford Review.
  • he and Mr. Thiel now had a setting in which to try out their ideas about diversity and meritocracy. “In the start-up crucible, performing is all that matters,” Mr. Sacks wrote about that time. He wanted to give all job applicants tests of cognitive ability, according to his colleague Keith Rabois, and when the company searched for a new chief executive, one of the requirements was an I.Q. of 160 — genius level.
  • intentionally or not, he stated something many people quietly believed: The same thing that made Silicon Valley phenomenally successful also kept it homogeneous, and start-ups had an almost inevitable like-with-like quality.
  • The kind of common ground shared by the early PayPal leaders “is always the critical ingredient on the founding teams,” Mr. Thiel said in an interview. “You have these great friendships that were built over some period of time. Silicon Valley flows out of deep relationships that people have built. That’s the structural reality.”
  • Another woman from the class of 1994 was quoted in the Fortune article: Trae Vassallo, who was Traci Neist when she built the taco-eating machine all those years ago, attended Stanford Business School with Ms. Herrin and Ms. Bianchini, co-founded a mobile device company, and then joined Kleiner Perkins, a premier venture capital firm.
  • The success of the struggle to create PayPal, and its eventual sale price, gave the men a new power: the knowledge to create new companies and the ability to fund their own and one another’s. Billion-dollar start-ups had been rare. But in the next few years, the so-called PayPal Mafia went on to found seven companies that reached blockbuster scale, including YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp and a business-messaging service called Yammer, founded by Mr. Sacks and sold a few years later to Microsoft for $1.2 billion.
  • Since 1999, the number of female partners in venture capital has declined by nearly half, from 10 percent to 6 percent, according to a recent Babson College study.
  • in early 2014, Ms. Vassallo was quietly let go. The firm was downsizing over all, especially in green technology, one of Ms. Vassallo’s specialties, and men were shown the exit as well. But in interviews, several former colleagues said it was far from an easy environment for women, with all-male outings and fierce internal competition for who got which board seat — meaning internal credit — for each company, not to mention a sexual discrimination lawsuit filed by a female junior partner, scheduled for trial in early 2015.
  • They also said that Ms. Vassallo, earnest and so technical that she started a robotics program at a local girls’ school, had not been as forceful, or as adept a politician, as some of her male peers.
  • Less than 10 years after graduation, he and Mr. Thiel had been transformed from outcasts into favorites with a reputation for seeing the future. Far from the only libertarians in Silicon Valley, they had finally found an environment that meshed perfectly with their desire for unfettered competition and freedom from constraints. The money they made seemed like vindication of their ideas.
  • As classmates started conversations with greetings like “How’s your fund?” some of those who did not work in technology joked that they felt like chumps. The Stanford campus had gone computer science crazy, with the majority of students taking programming courses. A career in technology didn’t feel like a risk anymore — it felt like a wise bet, said Jennifer Widom, a programming professor turned engineering dean. Computer science “is a degree that guarantees you a future, regardless of what form you decide to take it in,” she said.
  • The nature of start-ups was shifting again, too, this time largely in women’s favor. From servers onward, many components could be inexpensively licensed instead of custom-built. Founders could turn to a multiplying array of investment sources, meaning they no longer had to be supplicants at a handful of male-run venture firms. The promise that the Internet would be a leveler was finally becoming a bit more fulfilled.
  • The frenzy had an unlikely effect on the some members of the Stanford Review group: They were becoming cheerleaders for women in technology, not for ideological reasons, but for market-based ones.
  • Like many others, he was finding that the biggest obstacle to starting new companies was a dearth of technical talent so severe they worried it would hinder innovation.
  • The real surprise of the reunion weekend, however, was that more of the women in the class of ’94 were finally becoming entrepreneurs, later and on a smaller scale than many of the men, but founders nonetheless.
  • The rhythms of their lives and the technology industry were finally clicking: Companies were becoming easier to start just as their children were becoming more self-sufficient, and they did not want to miss another chance.
Javier E

America Fails the 'Rule of Law' Test - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...374274

rule of law US 9-11 law

shared by Javier E on 12 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The U.S. Army field manual defines "the rule of law" as follows: "The rule of law refers to a principle of governance in which all persons, institutions and entities, public and private, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced, and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards. It requires, as well, measures to ensure adherence to the principles of supremacy of law, equality before the law, accountability to the law, fairness in the application of the law, separation of powers, participation in decision-making, legal certainty, avoidance of arbitrariness and procedural and legal transparency."
  • it would be difficult to conclude that US targeted strikes are consistent with core rule of law norms," they declared. "From the perspective of many around the world, the U.S. appears to claim, in effect, the legal right to kill any person it determines is a member of al-Qaida or its associated forces, in any state on Earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret evidence, evaluated in a secret process by unknown and largely anonymous individuals—with no public disclosure of which organizations are considered 'associated forces,' no means for anyone outside that secret process to raise questions about the criteria or validity of the evidence, and no means for anyone outside that process to identify or remedy mistakes or abuses."
  • Unfortunately, the U.S. government violates "rule of law" norms in other areas too. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court does not operate with "procedural and legal transparency." The Office of Legal Counsel adopts highly contestable yet totally secret interpretations of statutes that dramatically affect policy outcomes. Citizens and corporations are served with secret court orders and often feel confused about whether they are even permitted to consult with counsel. Laws against revealing classified information are not enforced equally—powerful actors routinely leak official secrets with impunity, while whistleblowers and dissidents are aggressively persecuted for the mere "mishandling" of state secrets. The director of national intelligence committed perjury without consequence. President Obama has blatantly violated a duly ratified, legally binding treaty that requires him to investigate and prosecute acts of torture. He also violated the War Powers Resolution by participating in the military overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi without securing the approval of Congress. And he won't even clarify exactly what groups he considers us to be at war with! That is only a partial list.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The rule of law's erosion in post-9/11 America was begun by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration. Congress has failed to stop it. The Washington, D.C., establishment has done far too little to object. Partisan voters all across America have excused the transgressions of their side.
  • Unlike the Civil War, World War I, or World War II, there will be no definitive date when the War on Terrorism ends. The pattern of wartime abuses followed by a peacetime course correction will not automatically reassert itself in coming years. If the rule of law is to be recovered, lawbreaking officials must be held accountable for their actions, rather than presuming that they can invoke terrorism and do what they please. Congress must stop abdicating its responsibilities as a check on the executive branch. Transparency must once again govern what the law is and how it is applied.
Javier E

An Unsettling Complicity - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-an-unsettling-complicity.html

Africa development corruption foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A generation ago, the United States supported a brutal warlord, Jonas Savimbi, in Angola’s civil war. He lost. Now, because of oil interests, we have allied ourselves with the corrupt and autocratic winner, President José Eduardo dos Santos, in a way that also will also be remembered with embarrassment.
  • Secretary of State John Kerry visited for two days last year, and, in December, he hailed “the great dividends of our partnership with Angola.” He and other officials have enveloped Angola in a big hug.
  • Tom Burgis of The Financial Times has a powerful new book, “The Looting Machine,” asserting that firms, including Goldman Sachs and Carlyle Group, backed an oil company called Cobalt in investing in oil operations in which Angolan officials secretly held stakes worth staggering sums.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Likewise, American oil companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips are active in Angola. Groups like the One Campaign have pushed to require international oil companies to disclose sums paid to governments so that the money can be tracked — increasing the chance that it makes it into state coffers and not private pockets. Europe and Canada are requiring their companies to make these disclosures.
  • But the American Petroleum Institute is lobbying hard to water down disclosure requirements. The oil industry apparently seeks to sustain an opaque system that has allowed the Angolan president’s family to earn billions even as the country ranks No. 1 worldwide in child mortality rates.
  • The way to help children like Marcelina, or the 150,000 who die each year in Angola, is not just to hand out medicines. It’s to hold Angola’s leaders accountable so that they use oil money to buy deworming medicine and not $2,000-a-bottle Dom Pérignon. It’s to support those brave Angolans like Marques de Morais who are trying to improve governance
  • Marques de Morais has tracked $3 billion accumulated by President dos Santos’s daughter, the $13 million refurbishment of the presidential palace, the Lexus LX 570 luxury S.U.V.’s given to each member of Parliament — all at a time when children aren’t consistently getting five-cent deworming pills
katyshannon

Republican governor of Nevada Brian Sandoval being considered for Supreme Court - The W... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...tted-for-supreme-court-vacancy

republican governor nevada sandoval considered supreme court washington post US politics history obama

shared by katyshannon on 25 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • The White House is considering picking the Republican governor from Nevada to fill the current vacancy on the Supreme Court, scrambling political calculations in what is expected to be a contentious confirmation battle in which Senate Republicans have pledged to play the role of roadblock.
  • President Obama is weighing the selection of Brian Sandoval, a centrist former federal judge who has served as governor since 2011, according to two people familiar with the process
  • Though the review process is in its initial phases and it is unclear whether the governor could ultimately emerge as the president’s pick, even the prospect of his nomination poses a difficult dilemma for Senate Republicans who have promised not to consider any nomination before November’s elections.
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  • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who on Tuesday pledged “no action” on any Supreme Court nomination before the election, said in a statement that the nominee “will be determined by whoever wins the presidency in the fall.”
  • “The president’s focused on criteria that, frankly, is more important, and that is that individual’s qualifications, and their experience and their view of the law,” Earnest said. “That will take precedence over any sort of political consideration.”
  • Sandoval would represent an unconventional pick for the president, a former constitutional law professor who has prized prestigious law pedigrees and extensive legal backgrounds in the jurists he has previously selected for the Court.
  • While the selection of a Republican could heighten the political pressure on Senate GOP leaders, it could also alienate the Democratic base and runs counter to Obama’s emphasis on taking a long view of who deserves to sit on the nation’s highest court.
  • Speaking to reporters last week, the president said he planned to select someone with extraordinary legal credentials. “We’re going to find somebody who is has an outstanding legal mind, somebody who cares deeply about our democracy and cares about rule of law,” he said.
  • Asked about a potential nomination on Saturday, Sandoval told the Morning Consult, “It would be a privilege.” He called the Supreme Court “the essence of justice in this country.”
  • In a Wednesday interview with CNN, Reid said he would endorse Sandoval for the nomination. “I don’t pick the justices, but I know if he were picked, I would support the man,” he said. “He’s a good person, has a great record, and has been a tremendously good governor in spite of having to deal with some very big problems there.”
  • It is unclear how many potential nominees are under White House consideration for the high court vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Obama was seen last week carrying a thick binder of materials on potential picks to review.
  • As the standoff continued with Senate Republicans, Obama reiterated Wednesday morning that he intended to “do his job” by nominating a candidate during the remaining months of his presidency.
  • Some Democrats see a Sandoval nomination as the best opportunity to fracture the front of Republican opposition and force McConnell to take up the nomination in this contentious election year. It would also put on the spot a handful of Senate Republicans who are up for reelection in blue states in November.
  • Several Republican members of the Judiciary Committee, which is charged with considering a Supreme Court nominee, said Wednesday that it would not matter if Obama picked a Republican. “The short answer is no, it doesn’t change anything,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah).
  • But some Republican senators acknowledged a Sandoval pick would put GOP senators in a tough spot politically. “This is one reason why I have not wanted to shut the door on considering a nominee,” said Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), one of two Senate Republicans who is at least open to a confirmation hearing. “We may well be sent a nominee who is deserving of thorough vetting and consideration.”
  • Nominating Sandoval would carry clear political risks for Obama. Sandoval is aligned with Democrats on some key issues, including abortion rights and the environment. As governor, he has moved to implement the Affordable Care Act, and has said he considers same-sex marriage to be a settled issue.
  • But Sandoval is not seen as labor-friendly — potentially alienating a swath of the Democratic base. His legal credentials are also lacking compared to some of the other names under consideration who are mainly sitting federal judges. And he initially called the landmark health-care law “unconstitutional,” signing onto a brief in 2012 challenging the constitutionality of the measure’s individual mandate. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected that argument, and upheld the law.
johnsonma23

What if Nixon beat JFK? Everything might be different - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

nixon jfk US history

shared by johnsonma23 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • What if JFK had lost? 5 things that might be different
  • If just a few thousand votes in a few key states had gone the other way that day, you could argue that Cuba might now be our 51st state.
  • By the time it was over, Kennedy had won and Nixon's camp was quietly accusing the other side of dirty tricks. The election was about much more than Washington bragging rights.
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  • It ended up influencing events that would drive the next 20 years of the Cold War.
  • When it came to the Soviets, Nixon had more experience than Kennedy. Vice President Nixon had already faced off against Khrushchev in the famous "Kitchen Debate" during a visit to Moscow in 1959.
  • Nixon's language at the time was quite interventionist and hawkish. ... That makes me worry that he might have tried to invade Cuba."
  • A year later, it was discovered that the Soviets had deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba — just 90 miles from the United States.
  • "Kennedy allowed himself to be bullied by Khrushchev [in Vienna] and he regretted it," said Evan Thomas, an award-winning journalist, editor and author of "Being Nixon: A Man Divided."
  • If Nixon had made a stronger impression than Kennedy, perhaps the Soviets would never have put those missiles in Cuba. Then there never would have been a missile crisis at all.
  • In 1961, two months after a failed invasion by CIA-backed Cuban exiles at Cuba's Bay of Pigs, Kennedy met with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Austria.
  • f Nixon had won in 1960, it's likely Kennedy would not have been targeted for assassination -- and that means he might have lived long enough for his infamous sexual dalliances to become fodder for the news media.
  • It's hard to imagine a universe where Neil Armstrong did not walk on the moon. Would Nixon have called for a moon landing, as JFK did?
  • Nixon continued to support the lunar program during much of his presidency, which spanned all six moon landings.
  • "Under Nixon, NASA became just another domestic program, and the agency's budget decreased even as it retained ambitious goals," writes former NASA consultant Jason Callahan of the Planetary Society.
jongardner04

How Serious Is the French Proposal on Middle East Peace? - US News - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...-proposal-on-middle-east-peace

french middle east peace

shared by jongardner04 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • It is still unclear whether the international community will support the French initiative to restart talks on a two-state solution.
  • The ambitious French idea first suggested by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius at the end of January of holding an international conference to kick-start the two-state solution process in Paris in July is alive and kicking. A senior Western diplomat in Jerusalem told Al-Monitor that the initiative to restart Israeli-Palestinian talks has been adopted by the new French Foreign Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault.
  • The three-step approach — which France proposed at the end of January 2016 and includes consultations with Palestinians and Israelis, a spring preparatory meeting of the international working groups and a July conference in Paris — is definitely on track, the diplomat said.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • It is unclear how strongly the international community will support the French initiative. Washington appears to have washed its hands of the Palestinian conflict, although US Secretary of State John Kerry made a special effort to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Feb. 21 during Kerry's most recent visit to Amman. No details of that meeting have been made public and it is not clear whether the French conference idea was discussed.
  • A major stumbling block to the conference has been the possibility of Israel refusing to attend over the French desire to recognize a Palestinian state if the talks fail, according to the former minister. Speaking to an annual gathering of French diplomats Jan. 29 about what France would do if it faced a wall of Israeli rejection, Fabius said, "Well, … in this case, we need to face our responsibilities by recognizing the Palestinian state."
  • Despite the obvious skepticism due to past failures, an international effort to replicate the Iranian agreement process and solve the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict might work if there is seriousness behind the French effort and if Washington is willing to spend political capital to make it work.
johnsonma23

Neo-Nazis gain parliamentary seats in Slovakia - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...81400716

Romney trump US politics

shared by johnsonma23 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Neo-Nazis gain parliamentary seats in Slovakia
  • The leftist ruling party has won the parliamentary election in Slovakia, after campaigning on an anti-migrant ticket, but will need coalition partners to form a majority government, according to results announced on Sunday.
  • In a surprising development, a neo-Nazi party gained parliamentary seats for the first time.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The prime minister favors a strong state role in the economy, has been critical of Western sanctions against Russia and is known for strong anti-Muslim rhetoric.
  • The party says NATO is a terrorist organization and keeps attacking the European Union and Europe's common currency, the euro, which Slovakia uses.
  • The ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party, Fico's potential partner, returned to Parliament after a four-year-absence with 8.6 percent while the traditional party in the predominantly Roman Catholic country of 5.4 million, the Christian Democrats, didn't get enough votes to be represented.
  • neo-Nazi People's Party — Our Slovakia — got 8 percent, or 14 seats.
  • The pro-business Freedom and Solidarity became the second strongest party with 12.1 percent, or 21 seats, ahead of another center-right party, the Ordinary People with 11.0 percent.
  • Fico said it is his duty as the winner to create a meaningful government. He said he will open a first round of informal consultations with other parties Sunday.
  • Mitt Romney jumps on #NeverTrump: Our view
  • Donald Trump's strong showing on Super Tuesday put prominent Republicans in a tight spot. They have three distinct choices: Jump on the Trump bandwagon. Stay silent, and try to save their own skins if they end up on the November ballot beneath Trump. Or denounce Trump as unfit for the GOP nomination or the presidency.
  • Only a few prominent Republicans have had the courage to take that third path, and on Thursday they were joined by Mitt Romney, the GOP's candidate in 2012
  •  Calling Trump "a phony" and "a fraud," Romney said the billionaire businessman is unsuited by temperament, character and judgment to occupy the Oval Office and represent America on the world stage.
  • Shortly before Romney spoke, dozens of Republican national security experts, including former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, added their voices to the emerging anti-Trump drive by the GOP establishmen
  • , bullying and bigotry is as familiar as it is appalling, and practically every day brings a new outrage. Early in the campaign, he denigrated Mexican immigrants and Arizona Sen. John McCain, one of the nation's iconic war heroes and the party's standard-bearer in 2008.
  • y, he talked about loosening libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations, and on Sunday, two days before several primaries in the Deep South, he waffled over denouncing David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who had endorsed Trump.
  • Taking on a bully is much more unpleasant business, as Trump's rivals have discovered. After Romney's speech, Trump fired back with his usual fusillade of schoolyard insults, calling Romney a stiff, a choke artist, a lightweight, and a disaster as a candidate who ran a horrible campaign and begged for his endorsement in 2012.
  • But Americans can hope Romney's speech has the same effect as the confrontation that Army counsel Joseph Welch had in 1954 with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, another demagogue who took America down a dangerous and ugly road before a demand for decency stopped him.
lenaurick

First women elected to office in Saudi Arabia - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

saudi arabia politics culture women

shared by lenaurick on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • At least 17 women have been elected to public office in Saudi Arabia
  • he first time women in the country were allowed to vote and to run for office.
  • Despite the new rights extended to women, critics have said restrictions made it hard on women who wanted to run for office and vote.
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  • Female candidates also were barred from speaking to male voters and required to segregate campaign offices, the organization said.
  • n the end, 979 women candidates and 130,637 women voters registered to participate in the election, according to Saudi election officials. A total of 5,938 men ran for the local offices
  • The move to allow women to vote has been described as a step forward for equality in the male-dominated kingdom.
  • informal system of male guardianship over women that requires women be accompanied by a male guardian to travel or go to school.
  • Two years later, he ordered that at least 20% of seats in the Consultative Council be set aside for women.
  • The number of women in the Saudi workforce also has been increasing, from 23,000 in 2004 to more than 400,000 in 2015, according to the government.
lenaurick

Saudi Arabia elections: 900 women run for office - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

saudi arabia elections policy women

shared by lenaurick on 07 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • More than 900 women are campaigning for public office in Saudi Arabia
  • More than 900 women are campaigning for public office in Saudi Arabia -- a first in the kingdom's history.
  • Women will only participate in elections at the municipal level.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Just three months ago, Saudi women were allowed to register to vote for the first time.
  • the country remains an absolute monarchy ruled by the Saud family, which governs according to a strict Wahhabi interpretation of Sunni Islam.
  • Saudi women are forbidden to drive, and are not allowed to travel or go to school without a male guardian.
  • According to the U.S. State Department, municipal elections in Saudi Arabia fill half the seats in municipal councils, with the king selecting the other half.
  • The late King Abdullah also issued a royal decree in 2013 mandating the Consultative Council, a royally appointed body that advises the King, be at least 20% women,
maddieireland334

The Lonely Poverty of America's White Working Class - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...424341

shared by maddieireland334 on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern trend of steadily improving life expectancy.
  • A Pew study released last month found that the size of the middle class—defined by a consistent income range across generations—has shrunk over the last several decades.
  • The study builds on other recent research that finds that almost all the good jobs created since the recession have gone to college graduates.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • The workers I interviewed after the recession for my book on unemployment—less-educated factory workers—offer some tentative clues about what might be driving the disquieting trends described by the Case and Deaton study.
  • This is one of the groups hit hardest by the rising inequality and greater risk of unemployment and financial insecurity that have become features of today’s economy, and their experiences put in concrete terms how the economy and culture have become more hostile to workers not lucky enough to be working in posh offices on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.
  • When it comes to explaining American economic trends, it is important to remember how critical a role manufacturing and unions have played in the building—and now dismantling—of a strong middle class.
  • or generations, factories provided good jobs to people who never went to college, allowing families—first white ethnic immigrants, and then others—to be upwardly mobile.
  • But in the late ’90s—the beginning of the crisis period that Case and Deaton identify—the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. dropped dramatically.
  • Political leaders, bankrolled by the wealthy, rolled back the interventionist policies of the New Deal and postwar period.
  • Corporations, once relatively tolerant of unions, tapped a cottage industry of anti-union consultants and adopted unseemly tactics to crush any organizing drives in their workplaces.
  • the two-thirds of Americans over the age of 25 who don’t have a bachelor’s degree
  • Certainly, it cannot be said enough that African Americans and Latinos continue to fare significantly worse than whites in terms of their overall rates of death and disease, even if the racial gap has narrowed.
  • . In the decades after World War II, racial minorities were denied many of the jobs, loans, and other resources that allowed the white majority to buy homes and accrue wealth.
  • If the gains of economic growth have gone largely to the rich in recent years, in that earlier period the white working class could count on hefty rises in living standards from generation to generation, and they grew accustomed to that upward trajectory of growing prosperity.
  • For example, while the disappearance of high-paying jobs for those with little education is a large part of the overall story of a shrinking middle class, it can’t wholly account for the uptick of mortality identified in the Case and Deaton study.
  • Likewise, the groups that have been affected most viciously by these market trends in the U.S., African Americans and Latinos, have not suffered the dramatic increases in death by suicide or substance abuse that whites have.
  • hite Americans, for instance, are more likely to see success as the result of individual effort than African Americans are (though not Hispanics). The less educated, particularly less-educated whites, also share this view to a disproportionate degree.
  • As scholars of family life as politically distinct as Andrew Cherlin and Charles Murray have stressed, college graduates and the less educated have greatly diverged in terms of when and how they partner up and have kids.
  • Nowadays, well-educated couples are much more likely to marry, stay married, and have children within marriage than those with less schooling.
  • A large part of the explanation for this must be that society’s attitudes about the sanctity and permanence of marriage have changed. But it’s important to note that there is an economic dimension to these trends, too—as the frequent separations and divorces I saw among the long-term unemployed made plain to me.
  • Those struggling financially are less likely to follow the traditional path of first comes marriage, then comes a baby.
  • The waning of religious belief may be another trend aggravating the modern malaise of the white working class. Since the ’90s, the number of Americans who declare no religious preference on surveys has almost tripled—from 8 percent at the beginning of that decade, to 21 percent in 2014.
  • Many said their faith was helping them get through their ongoing troubles, yet they rarely or never went to church. Some felt ashamed to be around people because they were out of work.
  • For others, their religious belief was somewhat a source of self-help, rather than a source of community.
  • The larger context of this isolation and alienation is America’s culture of individualism. It, too, can worsen the despair. Taken to an extreme, self-reliance becomes a cudgel: Those who falter and fail have only themselves to blame.
  • America’s frontier spirit of rugged individualism is strong, and it manifests itself differently by race and education level, too.
  • When asked in national surveys about the people with whom they discussed “important matters” in the past six months, those with just a high-school education or less are likelier to say no one (this percentage has risen over the years for college graduates, too).
  • To this day, the supreme value of education remains one of the few things that Americans of all persuasions (presidential candidates included) can agree on.
  • Some of the analysis of the Case and Deaton article has focused rightly on recent developments in this country’s drug crisis—namely, the surge in abuse of prescription opioids, and the resurgence in heroin use, notably among whites.
  • There is clearly a pressing need to deal more vigorously with this drug problem and the epidemic of fatal overdoses and liver disease that has affected the poor and working class in particular.
  • At the same time, it should be said that risky individual behaviors are shaped by broader social conditions. As the researchers Bruce Link and Jo Phelan have argued, effective health interventions need to consider the underlying factors that put people “at risk of risks”—specifically, socioeconomic status and social support.
  • One parting observation, then, is that policies to keep people from sinking into poverty and long-term unemployment can make a huge difference.
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