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there is a meaningful chance that 2016 could begin a retreat of the United States from the mix of economic policies and the global engagement that U.S. businesses have regarded for decades as central to their success — unless business leaders can move decisively to redefine their goals as harmonious with those of working- and middle-class families.

The key question is how we rise up in more muscular defense of the interests of U.S. workers and industries without doing permanent damage to our economy. We must also demonstrate that government can function and that business can be a constructive partner to it.

every generation, we seem to witness an election that startles us, triggering tectonic shocks that change our politics and policies for decades to come. This could be one of those elections. Very much like the realignment revealed by the vote in Britain to leave the European Union, U.S. politics might be transforming into a debate less between right and left and more between those voters who are advantaged by globalization and those who are not.

Air emissions of toxic chemicals from industrial facilities saw an 8 percent decrease from 2014 to 2015, continuing their 10-year decline, according to the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) National Analysis.

hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, toluene and mercury were among chemicals with significantly lower air releases at TRI-covered facilitie

This year’s report also includes a section highlighting the new Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, which updated the Toxic Substances Control Act

Mrs. May is scheduled to make a long-awaited speech on her plans on Tuesday, but the British weekend papers and Sunday news programs were briefed by Downing Street about the main lines of the policy, and some published selected quotations of what Mrs. May is scheduled to say.

She and her officials have made it clear that her two main priorities are ending the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice over British law, and restoring British control over its borders and immigration, including from the European Union.

“If it proves necessary, we have said we will consider time for implementation of new arrangements,” he wrote. “We don’t want the E.U. to fail, we want it to prosper economically and politically, and we need to persuade our allies that a strong new partnership with the U.K. will help the E.U. to do that.”

his aggressively pronounced policy of America First will actually result in America Last — not literally last, but declining in power and prestige because the United States no longer views its role in the world as promoting economic and geopolitical stability for our allies.

, he imagines a world in which the United States takes what it can and worries about others only as an afterthought. What does he expect other countries to do? The answer is obvious. They will act more aggressively in their own selfish interests, leading to a further disintegration of post-World War II economic and political alliances.

for decades, they and we have identified self-interest with collective commitments to global commerce and military cooperation.

a rule is back in effect to block U.S. international family-planning assistance to foreign organizations that use funds from other sources to perform or discuss abortions.

einstating a rule first instituted by President Reagan

Stop providing abortions, or any information about abortions, or lose valuable dollars from the United States, the biggest global funder of family-planning services.

Growing tensions between Europe and Turkey over elements of a deal to end the refugee crisis are raising fears that the accord, signed by the two sides in March, may already be on the verge of collapse.

The latest sign of trouble came this week when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned European leaders that he would block the deal if the European Union refused to lift visa restrictions for Turks

steps

Asked whether he would press Mr. Erdogan “to make sure the rule of law applies,” Mr. Trump did not emphasize the delicate nature of criticizing a strategically important ally. Instead, he focused inward, saying that “when it comes to civil liberties, our country has a lot of problems, and I think it’s very hard for us to get involved in other countries when we don’t know what we are doing and we can’t see straight in our own country.”

This argument — that the United States could not be a model because of its domestic problems — was made during the early years of the Cold War, when racial segregation and violence against civil rights demonstrators generated international criticism. But this case was made by Soviet propagandists, not American presidential candidates.

Past presidents have had various motivations beyond a commitment to the ideal (if not the full implementation) of equality. One reason, pressed by successive secretaries of state, was that protecting rights at home mattered to America’s global standing

The injustice compounds, congeals until there is an almost tangible sense of dread and grievance that compels a community to understand the police as objects of fear, not respect.

Less appreciated is the danger illegitimacy ultimately poses to those who must do the policing. For if the law represents nothing but the greatest force, then it really is indistinguishable from any other street gang. And if the law is nothing but a gang, then it is certain that someone will resort to the kind of justice typically meted out to all other powers in the street.

something that went very wrong, long ago, with law enforcement, something that we are scared to see straight. That something has very little to do with the officer on the beat and everything to do with ourselves. There’s a sense that the police departments of America have somehow gone rogue. In fact, the police are one of the most trusted institutions in the country. This is not a paradox. The policies which the police carry out are not the edicts of a dictatorship but the work, as Biden put it, of “the greatest democracy in the history of the world.” Avoiding this fact is central to the current conversation around “police reform” which focuses solely on the actions of police officers and omits everything that precedes these actions

in these years, we’ve morphed into the planet’s invading aliens.

Think about it. Over the last half-century, whenever and wherever the U.S. military “deploys,” often to underdeveloped towns and villages in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq, it arrives very much in the spirit of those sci-fi aliens. After all, it brings with it dazzlingly destructive futuristic weaponry and high-tech gadgetry of all sorts (known in the military as “force-multipliers”). It then proceeds to build mothership-style bases that are often like American small towns plopped down in a new environment. Nowadays in such lands, American drones patrol the skies (think: the “Terminator” films), blast walls accented with razor wire and klieg lights provide “force protection” on the ground, and the usual attack helicopters, combat jets and gunships hover overhead like so many alien craft. To designate targets to wipe out, U.S. forces even use lasers.

In the field, American military officers emerge from high-tech vehicles to bark out commands in a harsh “alien” tongue. (You know: English.

Taking all of this together, a typical Leave voter has authoritarian beliefs, yet no faith in the political system to implement authoritarian policies or to improve society some other way. Under these circumstances, individuals display what sociologists call “negative solidarity,” a feeling that if they’re to suffer, then everyone should, too

Ever since the rise of “Reagan Democrats” (working-class white voters converting to the Republican Party in the 1980s), the GOP has strategically harnessed anger and alienation to win votes from people for whom its economic policies have little to offer. This phenomenon has survived for a number of decades, most notably explored by Thomas Frank in “What’s the Matter With Kansas.”

Could the implausibility and danger associated with Trump be part of what makes him appealing, at least for people who no longer care about making realistic plans for a future they already see as beyond rescue? There is good reason to suspect this is the case.

Trump is not just winning; he is also redefining how politics is done. Out: policy speeches, white papers, paid media, the ground game. In: monologues, social media, free media, advance work on big rallies. Few politicians in history — Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mastery of radio and Ronald Reagan’s use of television come to mind — have more instinctually and effectively adapted to new communication methods.

justifications are not insane, but they are ultimately not persuasive. Trump has little history of changing or refining his views through study and policy advice. Many of his goals, while too foolish to implement, are too vivid to revise. Try to imagine President Trump backing down on building the great wall or halting Muslim migration.

On these matters, Trump is entirely unmoored and unpredictable. It is hard to justify a presidency, which would be dangerous and destabilizing in other ways, on odds this long

The White House recently sought to enlist the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice to build a case for its controversial and unpopular immigration ban, CNN reported on Thursday. Among intelligence professionals, the request to produce analysis that supports a favored policy—vice producing analysis, and allowing it to inform policy—is called politicization

An internal CIA post-mortem concluded that the CIA’s assessments of the Iraqi WMD program were a case of an effective denial-and-deception program that fed prevailing assumptions.

At the Central Intelligence Agency, where I served as director of strategy in the Directorate of Analysis, the subject of politicization is introduced to analysts almost as soon as they enter into service. There is good reason for this: Politicization is not an academic issue.

At least 12,472 refugees and migrants have arrived on Europe's shores since the beginning of 2017, according to the UN refugee agency -- only slightly less than the 12,587 Syrian refugees admitted by the US in all of last year.

The UK government recently announced it was halting a program to resettle lone refugee children, after 350 had been brought to Britain. Campaigners had hoped that 3,000 children would benefit from the scheme, introduced last year.

In November 2016, the Home Office issued new guidance barring unaccompanied refugees from Afghanistan, Yemen and Eritrea older than 12, who were living in the now-demolished "Jungle" camp at Calais in northern France, from entering the UK if they have no family there.

the federal courts are the guardians of our Constitution. That is certainly true, but it not the whole story. In fact, the most important function of the federal courts is to legitimate state building by the political branches.

What is "state building?" Throughout our country's history, government has taken on many new functions. The early 19th century American state actually didn't do very much more than national defense and customs collection. The executive branch was tiny. Over the years, the federal government took on more and more obligations, offering new protections and new services for its citizens. After the Civil War, Congress passed a series of civil rights laws, it created the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroads, it passed an income tax, and early in the twentieth century it created a central bank. State building really took off after the New Deal, which established the modern administrative and regulatory state and added a host of labor and consumer protection regulations, investments in infrastructure, and Social Security. The National Security State was born after World War II, and the 1960s brought new civil rights laws and new social welfare programs through the Great Society. At the turn of the 21st century, the federal government expanded its national security infrastructure even further, implementing vast new surveillance programs and strategies for dealing with terrorism

Whenever the federal government expands its capabilities, it changes the nature of the social compact. Sometimes the changes are small, but sometimes, as in the New Deal or the civil rights era, the changes are big. And when the changes are big, courts are called on to legitimate the changes and ensure that they are consistent with our ancient Constitution.

“Why Nations Fail,” by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, respectively, is a wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world to answer the very big question of why some countries get rich and others don’t.

“politics.” Mr. Acemoglu and Mr. Robinson divide the world into countries governed by “inclusive” institutions and those ruled by “extractive” ones. Inclusive societies, with England and its Glorious Revolution of 1688 in the vanguard, deliver sustainable growth and technological innovation. Extractive ones can have spurts of prosperity, but because they are ruled by a narrow elite guided by its own self-interest, their economic vigor eventually fades.

“It is about societies where the elite, the rich, can do what they want and those where they cannot.”

you have a consolidation of power that is so overwhelming, not just in its ability to control resources and drive the economy and redistribute wealth upward, but basically to provide the most fraudulent definition of what a democracy should be. I mean, the notion that profit making is the essence of democracy, the notion that economics is divorced from ethics, the notion that the only obligation of citizenship is consumerism, the notion that the welfare state is a pathology, that any form of dependency basically is disreputable and needs to be attacked, I mean, this is a vicious set of assumptions.

The biggest lie of all is that capitalism is democracy. We have no way of understanding democracy outside of the market, just as we have no understanding of how to understand freedom outside of market values.

Metaphorically. Two things happened. 1) There was this assumption that the government was evil except when it regulated its power to benefit the rich. So it wasn't a matter of smashing the government as Reagan seemed to suggest, it was a matter of rearranging it and reconfiguring it so it served the wealthy, the elites and the corporate,

TPM Editor’s Blog GOP’s Long-Predicted Comeuppance Has Arrived Share this story on Facebook Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); Tweet this story Email this story to a friend Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., right, the Republican Conference Chair, arrive at the House of Representatives. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) Brian Beutler July 31, 2013, 5:55 PM 65028 Republicans have dealt with some embarrassing moments on the House floor over the past year, but none so revealing or damning as today’s snafu, when they yanked a bill to fund the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. Even the recent farm bill fiasco wasn’t as significant an indictment of the GOP’s governing potential. It might look like a minor hiccup, or a symbolic error. But it spells doom for the party’s near-term budget strategy and underscores just how bogus the party’s broader agenda really is and has been for the last four years. In normal times, the House and Senate would each pass a budget, the differences between those budgets would be resolved, and appropriators in both chambers would have binding limits both on how much money to spend, and on which large executive agencies to spend it. But these aren’t normal times. Republicans have refused to negotiate away their budget differences with Democrats, and have instead instructed their appropriators to use the House GOP budget as a blueprint for funding the government beyond September. Like all recent GOP budgets, this year’s proposes lots of spending on defense and security, at the expense of all other programs. Specifically, it sets the total pool of discretionary dollars at sequestration levels, then funnels money from thinly stretched domestic departments (like Transportation and HUD) to the Pentagon and a few other agencies. But that’s all the budget says. It doesn’t say how to allocate the dollars, nor does it grapple in any way with the possibility that cutting domestic spending so profoundly might be unworkable. It’s an abstraction.

It turns out that when you draft bills enumerating all the specific cuts required to comply with the budget’s parameters, they don’t come anywhere close to having enough political support to pass. Even in the GOP House.

many close Congress watchers — and indeed many Congressional Democrats — have long suspected that their votes for Ryan’s budgets were a form of cheap talk. That Republicans would chicken out if it ever came time to fill in the blanks. Particularly the calls for deep but unspecified domestic discretionary spending cuts.