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johnsonma23

BBC News - US-Cuba travel and trade: New rules start on Friday - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-latin-america-30836679

bbc travel policy Obama US

shared by johnsonma23 on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • US-Cuba travel and trade: New rules start on Friday
  • New travel and trade rules between the US and Cuba are to take effect on Friday, US officials say.
  • allowing US citizens to use credit cards in Cuba and for US businesses to export some technologies.
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  • $100 (£66) in alcohol and tobacco from Cuba. Correspondents say it means the US ban on Cuban cigars is over.
  • The move implements last month's agreement to re-establish ties severed since 1961.
  • large dent in the US trade embargo against Cuba, only Congress can lift it completely.
  • release of 53 political prisoners agreed as part of the historic deal.
  • "immediately enable the American people to provide more resources to empower the Cuban population to become less dependent upon the state-driven economy".
  • new regulations will allow US citizens to travel to Cuba for any of a dozen specific reasons
  • A change in the regulations will also allow US investments in some small businesses and agricultural operations.
  • johnsonma23 on 16 Jan 15
     
    Cuba and US travel and trade new regulations, and changes
Javier E

Walmart's Visible Hand - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...man-walmarts-visible-hand.html

social science economics labor wages income policy theory middle-class government research history politics

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Conservatives — with the backing, I have to admit, of many economists — normally argue that the market for labor is like the market for anything else. The law of supply and demand, they say, determines the level of wages, and the invisible hand of the market will punish anyone who tries to defy this law.
  • Specifically, this view implies that any attempt to push up wages will either fail or have bad consequences. Setting a minimum wage, it’s claimed, will reduce employment and create a labor surplus, the same way attempts to put floors under the prices of agricultural commodities used to lead to butter mountains, wine lakes and so on
  • Pressuring employers to pay more, or encouraging workers to organize into unions, will have the same effect.
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  • But labor economists have long questioned this view
  • the labor force — is people. And because workers are people, wages are not, in fact, like the price of butter, and how much workers are paid depends as much on social forces and political power as it does on simple supply and demand.
  • What’s the evidence? First, there is what actually happens when minimum wages are increased. Many states set minimum wages above the federal level, and we can look at what happens when a state raises its minimum while neighboring states do no
  • the overwhelming conclusion from studying these natural experiments is that moderate increases in the minimum wage have little or no negative effect on employment.
  • Then there’s history. It turns out that the middle-class society we used to have didn’t evolve as a result of impersonal market forces — it was created by political action, and in a brief period of time
  • America was still a very unequal society in 1940, but by 1950 it had been transformed by a dramatic reduction in income disparities, which the economists Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo labeled the Great Compression.
  • How did that happen?
  • Part of the answer is direct government intervention, especially during World War II, when government wage-setting authority was used to narrow gaps between the best paid and the worst paid. Part of it, surely, was a sharp increase in unionization. Part of it was the full-employment economy of the war years, which created very strong demand for workers and empowered them to seek higher pay.
  • the Great Compression didn’t go away as soon as the war was over. Instead, full employment and pro-worker politics changed pay norms, and a strong middle class endured for more than a generation. Oh, and the decades after the war were also marked by unprecedented economic growth.
  • Walmart is under political pressure over wages so low that a substantial number of employees are on food stamps and Medicaid. Meanwhile, workers are gaining clout thanks to an improving labor market, reflected in increasing willingness to quit bad jobs.
  • its justification for the move echoes what critics of its low-wage policy have been saying for years: Paying workers better will lead to reduced turnover, better morale and higher productivity.
  • What this means, in turn, is that engineering a significant pay raise for tens of millions of Americans would almost surely be much easier than conventional wisdom suggests. Raise minimum wages by a substantial amount; make it easier for workers to organize, increasing their bargaining power; direct monetary and fiscal policy toward full employment, as opposed to keeping the economy depressed out of fear that we’ll suddenly turn into Weimar Germany. It’s not a hard list to implement — and if we did these things we could make major strides back toward the kind of society most of us want to live in.
  • The point is that extreme inequality and the falling fortunes of America’s workers are a choice, not a destiny imposed by the gods of the market. And we can change that choice if we want to.
qkirkpatrick

Russian-Backed Rebels Claim To Capture Debaltseve, Key Ukrainian Town - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...bels-debaltseve_n_6697084.html

ukraine politics Russia rebels

shared by qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Under a near-constant barrage of artillery fire, Ukrainian forces and separatist rebels fought fierce street battles Tuesday for control of the strategic railway hub of Debaltseve, a battle impeding implementation of a peace plan.
  • Ukraine denied rebel claims to have taken control of the town but acknowledged the separatists had seized parts of it.
  • A key railroad junction between the separatist east's two main cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, Debaltseve has been the focus of fighting over the past two weeks and capturing it would be a prize for the Russia-backed rebels.
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  • On Tuesday, a deadline passed for both sides to begin pulling back heavy weapons from the front line.
Javier E

Palo Alto train death opens fresh wound in a community searching for solutions - Contra... - 0 views

www.contracostatimes.com/...th-opens-fresh-wound-community

suicide silicon valley teen

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The boy's death happened at about 6:25 a.m. on the tracks just south of the city's Churchill Avenue, near the elegant century-old high school on an oak-studded Spanish Mission campus, directly across the street from Stanford University, in a ZIP code synonymous with success. Two student suicides earlier this school year at neighboring Gunn High School led to a flurry of community meetings and teen outreach, and the district has been working to overhaul its teen mental-health policies since a much-publicized cluster of student suicides in 2009.
  • the very life of the school district has been altered in ways large and small. Social studies classes start with meditation. Teachers and staff have been taught to help identify teens struggling with depression or in distress. The district is accelerating construction of a student wellness center at Gunn High School, where students can talk to counselors and mental health professionals and nutritionists to decompress.To reduce stress, the school district -- home to the progeny of top Stanford faculty and many of Silicon Valley's tech titans -- reformed its homework policy in 2012, but the plan was never fully implemented. Now it is back on the school board's agenda. The district also recently contracted with a data-analysis firm called Hanover Research Group to analyze homework, grading practices and curriculum.
  • Both Gunn and Paly have convened sessions to listen to students. A similar communitywide gathering was held last week, and another is scheduled. Teachers offer academic accommodations -- like not collecting homework, or delaying tests -- and Paly economics teacher Alexander Davis created a "Gratitude Wall" in his classroom for students to write what they are grateful for on sticky notes.Paly, many students say, is a place where teachers care about their well-being. But the causes of suicide are complex.The school offers an array of electives and resources. "There's journalism, glassblowing, theater -- there may be a little more pressure, but a lot more opportunity here," said senior Jack Brook. "People are happy when they find a passion, and there's a lot of opportunity to find a passion here."
Javier E

Stalin, Father of Ukraine? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...stalin-father-of-ukraine.html

ukraine stalin history culture russia

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • on Nov. 28, 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament officially designated the famine of 1931-33, which killed 5 to 7 million Soviets during Stalin’s rule, a genocide.
  • Stalin’s rule is rightly associated with two of the most horrific episodes in Ukraine’s history: the famine and the 1937-38 mass executions of Ukrainian intellectuals and political figures, both of which took place across the Soviet Union.
  • In 1922, Stalin proposed folding Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Caucasus into Soviet Russia (formally known as the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic) while allowing them to retain substantial autonomy, a proposal that initially elicited Lenin’s support. But Lenin soon changed his mind, and demanded a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in which Ukraine and Russia would hold ostensibly equal status.
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  • Ukraine emerged out of czarist Russia as a separate country as a result of World War I, the revolutions of 1917, German military occupation and the efforts of Ukrainian nationalists. Against the wishes of other early Soviet officials, who wanted to suppress nationalism, Stalin strongly advocated recognizing — and using — it. “Clearly, the Ukrainian nation exists and the development of its culture is a duty of Communists,” Stalin told the 10th Party Congress in March 1921. “One cannot go against history.”
  • Lenin’s counterproposal was based not on a commitment to self-rule but, like Stalin, on tactics. He argued that as other countries underwent socialist revolutions — a Soviet Germany, a Soviet Hungary, a Soviet Finland — they, too, could join the new Soviet Union.
  • Stalin bowed to Lenin’s authority, and loyally and skillfully implemented the Bolshevik leader’s vision to form the Soviet Union in late 1922. Lenin’s vision amounted to an overconfident bet on world revolution. Stalin also believed in world revolution, but his proposal — annexation into Russia — would have been a hedge on that bet.
  • Except for Crimea, today’s nationalist Ukraine is a bequeathal of Stalin. It’s true that he executed countless officials of Ukrainian (and every other) ethnicity. But as the Soviet state expanded, he promoted still more Ukrainians to take their places.
  • Mr. Putin cannot simply swallow Ukraine — it is no longer “New Russia.” And unlike Stalin — indeed, because of Stalin, and because of his regime’s own behavior — Mr. Putin cannot entice Ukraine back into a new “Eurasian” union with Russia either. Ukrainians have little affection for Stalin’s dictatorship, but their struggle for statehood owes much to his legacy — a legacy that, for different reasons, neither they nor Mr. Putin like to think about.
gaglianoj

Russia still has troops in Ukraine, NATO says | Reuters - 0 views

uk.reuters.com/...sis-nato-idUKKCN0ID0V120141024

ukraine

shared by gaglianoj on 25 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • (Reuters) - Russia still has troops in eastern Ukraine and retains a very capable force on the border despite a partial withdrawal, NATO's military commander said on Friday.
  • "But the force that remains and shows no indications of leaving is still a very, very capable force," said Breedlove, NATO's supreme allied commander Europe.The presence of a "large coercive force" on the Ukraine border was not helpful to progress in implementing the Minsk agreement, he said, referring to a ceasefire agreement between Ukraine and pro-Russian rebels reached in the Belarussian capital last month.
  • NATO has suspended practical cooperation with Russia in protest against Moscow's annexation of Crimea and its support for the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Javier E

Owner of a Credit Card Processor Is Setting a New Minimum Wage: $70,000 a Year - NYTime... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...minimum-wage-70000-a-year.html

minimum wage income happiness research inequality CEO

shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Mr. Price surprised his 120-person staff by announcing that he planned over the next three years to raise the salary of even the lowest-paid clerk, customer service representative and salesman to a minimum of $70,000.
  • Under a financial overhaul passed by Congress in 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission was supposed to require all publicly held companies to disclose the ratio of C.E.O. pay to the median pay of all other employees, but it has so far failed to put it in effect. Corporate executives have vigorously opposed the idea, complaining it would be cumbersome and costly to implement.
  • his unusual proposal does speak to an economic issue that has captured national attention: The disparity between the soaring pay of chief executives and that of their employees.
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  • The United States has one of the world’s largest pay gaps, with chief executives earning nearly 300 times what the average worker makes, according to some economists’ estimates. That is much higher than the 20-to-1 ratio recommended by Gilded Age magnates like J. Pierpont Morgan and the 20th century management visionary Peter Drucker.
  • “The market rate for me as a C.E.O. compared to a regular person is ridiculous, it’s absurd,” said Mr. Price, who said his main extravagances were snowboarding and picking up the bar bill. He drives a 12-year-old Audi
  • Mr. Price, who started the Seattle-based credit-card payment processing firm in 2004 at the age of 19, said he would pay for the wage increases by cutting his own salary from nearly $1 million to $70,000 and using 75 to 80 percent of the company’s anticipated $2.2 million in profit this year.
  • Of all the social issues that he felt he was in a position to do something about as a business leader, “that one seemed like a more worthy issue to go after.”
  • The happiness research behind Mr. Price’s announcement on Monday came from Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist. They found that what they called emotional well-being — defined as “the emotional quality of an individual’s everyday experience, the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one’s life pleasant or unpleasant” — rises with income, but only to a point. And that point turns out to be about $75,000 a year.
  • Of course, money above that level brings pleasures — there’s no denying the delights of a Caribbean cruise or a pair of diamond earrings — but no further gains on the emotional well-being scale.
  • As Mr. Kahneman has explained it, income above the threshold doesn’t buy happiness, but a lack of money can deprive you of it.
Javier E

Lee Kuan Yew, the Man Who Remade Asia - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...man-who-remade-asia-1427475547

Singapore history modernization Chinese authoritarian development economic role model asians

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Left with no other allies, he turned to Singapore’s own people, who were immigrants like himself. Because they were so divided by what he called “the most hideous collection of dialects and languages,” he quickly concluded that, if full democracy were implemented, everyone would simply vote for their own ethnic group and overlook the common interests of the country.
  • Impressed by the economic growth enjoyed by Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and finally China, Lee began wondering if their common Confucian heritage was not the foundation of their success. He was soon propounding the Confucian virtues that came to be known as “Asian values”—family, diligence, filial piety, education and obedience to authority. He viewed these values as binding agents for developing countries that needed to find a way to maintain order during times of rapid change.
  • there was an irony in Lee’s latter-day conversion to Chinese traditionalism and Asian authoritarianism, especially in his insistence that they could serve as agents of modernization. After all, it was only a few decades earlier that reform-minded Chinese intellectuals (including Communists like Mao Zedong) had identified such Confucian “Asian values” as the very cause of their country’s backwardness and weakness, and then sought to extirpate them from Chinese thinking.
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  • Then, just as Lee was extolling his notion of “Asian values” abroad, something unexpected happened in China. Faced with social upheaval brought about by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, leaders in Beijing began groping for new ways to maintain order themselves. Intrigued by what Lee had been doing in Singapore, they too began reviving aspects of their old cultural edifice as a stabilizing force. The cultural vacuums in Singapore and China may have had different origins, but some version of “Asian values” suddenly felt like a comfortable remedy for both.
  • “I consider Deng a greater leader who changed the destiny of China and the world,” he said. He was deeply gratified by the way that Deng had brought wealth, power, order and pride back to China—still his racial homeland—as well as to all Chinese.
  • Deng’s admiration of Lee was just as deep. He appreciated Lee’s pragmatism and friendship, especially his refusal to criticize China for its undemocratic form of statecraft, even after the infamy of 1989. And, because “the Singapore model” proved that a country could modernize without surrendering to “wholesale Westernization,” Deng (and all subsequent leaders in Beijing) celebrated it. “If I had only Shanghai, I too might be able to change Shanghai as quickly,” he once wistfully lamented of his success. “But I have the whole of China!”
  • For Lee, the Chinese aphorism that best captured the uniquely Asian/Confucian view of the individual’s role in society was: Xiushen, qijia, zhiguo, pingtianxia: “Bringing peace under heaven first requires cultivating oneself, then taking care of one’s family, and finally looking after one’s country.”
  • Various people have described today’s supremely well-ordered Singapore as “a think tank state,” “a paradise designed by McKinsey” or “Disneyland with the death penalty.”
  • Modern Singapore boasts the world’s second-busiest port, its most celebrated airline and an airport that hosts 15 million visitors a year. With an annual average growth rate of almost 7% since 1976, it now has a per capita income of well over $50,000, making it the wealthiest country in Asia. And it has the second most entrepreneurs per capita in the world, trailing only the U.S.
  • Where did his enormous commitment and energy come from? How was he able to create such an unusual success story from virtually nothing?
  • Lee was a very different leader from his confreres in Beijing, but he shared something important with them: a mutual sense that, despite the long, painful and humiliating history of the Chinese people’s modern weakness, it was their destiny to make something of themselves
  • Lee once described the Chinese as burdened by “a sense of frustration that they were down for so long” and as “enormously ambitious to catch up.” As this rebirth finally began in the 1990s, it allowed Lee to proudly proclaim that China’s “reawakened sense of destiny is an overpowering force.” In making such utterances, he seemed to be speaking as a Chinese who identified as much with his race as with his nation
  • When Lee’s ancestors joined the great Chinese diaspora, they were stripped of their culture and national identities. This defoliating process created, in them and later generations of overseas Chinese, a strange kind of hunger for advancement
  • in Singapore, Lee could begin to satisfy that longing for progress uninhibited by the conservative traditions that have so often clashed with modernizing impulses around the world. His new country may have been an almost synthetic nation, without a coherent cultural core, but this relative vacuum ended up being a blessing in disguise when it came to the challenges of creating a completely new state from the bottom up.
  • China faced a similar situation in the wake of its own tectonic revolutionary upheavals. Mao Zedong once spoke of his people as possessing “two remarkable peculiarities.” They were, he said, “first poor and secondly blank,” which meant that they were inclined to “want revolution.” As he observed, “a clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.”
  • Mao’s savage Cultural Revolution destroyed even more of his country’s cultural legacy. But he was fond of reminding his followers that, “Without destruction there can be no reconstruction.” By the time Deng came to power in the late 1970s, his own reforms met with little resistance from those traditional forces that had so obstructed change earlier in the century. Like Lee in Singapore, Deng was aided by the fact that traditional culture had already been demolished.
  • Lee Kuan Yew not only made Singaporeans proud; he also made Chinese and other Asians proud. He was a master builder, a sophisticated Asian nationalist dedicated not only to the success of his own small nation but to bequeathing the world a new model of governance
  • Instead of trying to impose Western political models on Asian realities, he sought to make autocracy respectable by leavening it with meritocracy, the rule of law and a strict intolerance for corruption to make it deliver growth.
  • He saw “Asian values” as a source of legitimacy for the idea that authoritarian leadership, constrained by certain Western legal and administrative checks, offered an effective “Asian” alternative to the messiness of liberal democracy. Because his thinking proved so agreeable to the Chinese Communist Party, he became the darling of Beijing. And because China has now become the political keystone of the modern Asian arch, Beijing’s imprimatur helped him and his ideas to gain a pan-Asian stature that Singapore alone could not have provided.
Javier E

The Halloween Costume Controversy at Yale's Silliman College - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...414810

campus Yale halloween free speech victimization tolerance culture

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Watching footage of that meeting, a fundamental disagreement is revealed between professor and undergrads.
  • Christakis believes that he has an obligation to listen to the views of the students, to reflect upon them, and to either respond that he is persuaded or to articulate why he has a different view. Put another way, he believes that one respects students by engaging them in earnest dialogue.
  • But many of the students believe that his responsibility is to hear their demands for an apology and to issue it. They see anything short of a confession of wrongdoing as unacceptable. In their view, one respects students by validating their subjective feelings.
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  • Notice that the student position allows no room for civil disagreement.
  • In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argued that too many college students engage in “catastrophizing,” which is to say, turning common events into nightmarish trials or claiming that easily bearable events are too awful to bear. After citing examples, they concluded, “smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.”
  • As students saw it, their pain ought to have been the decisive factor in determining the acceptability of the Halloween email. They thought their request for an apology ought to have been sufficient to secure one. Who taught them that it is righteous to pillory faculty for failing to validate their feelings, as if disagreement is tantamount to disrespect? Their mindset is anti-diversity, anti-pluralism, and anti-tolerance, a seeming data-point in favor of April Kelly-Woessner’s provocative argument that “young people today are less politically tolerant than their parents’ generation.”
  • This notion that one’s existence can be invalidated by a fellow 18-year-old donning an offensive costume is perhaps the most disempowering notion aired at Yale.
  • It ought to be disputed rather than indulged for the sake of these students, who need someone to teach them how empowered they are by virtue of their mere enrollment; that no one is capable of invalidating their existence, full stop; that their worth is inherent, not contingent; that everyone is offended by things around them; that they are capable of tremendous resilience; and that most possess it now despite the disempowering ideology foisted on them by well-intentioned, wrongheaded ideologues encouraging them to imagine that they are not privileged.
  • Here’s one of the ways that white men at Yale are most privileged of all: When a white male student at an elite college says that he feels disempowered, the first impulse of the campus left is to show him the extent of his power and privilege. When any other students say they feel disempowered, the campus left’s impulse is to validate their statements. This does a huge disservice to everyone except white male students.
  • That isn’t to dismiss all complaints by Yale students. If contested claims that black students were turned away from a party due to their skin color are true, for example, that is outrageous. If any discrete group of students is ever discriminated against, or disproportionately victimized by campus crime, or graded more harshly by professors, then of course students should protest and remedies should be implemented.
Javier E

Barring of British Muslim Family Flying to Disneyland Touches Nerve - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-muslim-family-disneyland.html

muslim discrimination travel border

shared by Javier E on 25 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group in Washington, said Wednesday that it had asked the Department of Homeland Security to investigate whether its officials had “implemented informally” Mr. Trump’s proposal.
  • That request came amid signs that a number of British Muslims had been stopped without explanation at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick Airports in recent days — not just the 11-member Mahmood family, which was abruptly denied permission to board a Los Angeles-bound jetliner at Gatwick on Dec. 15.
  • Ajmal Masroor, a prominent British imam who has spoken out against Islamic extremism, said on Facebook on Wednesday that he was barred from boarding a flight at Heathrow on Dec. 17 by an American diplomatic official who gave no explanation.
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  • Daniel Hetlage, a spokesman for the Customs and Border Protection unit of the United States Department of Homeland Security, declined to discuss the specifics of any case, but he denied that religion was a factor in deciding who could enter.
  • An applicant to enter the United States “must overcome all grounds of inadmissibility,” Mr. Hetlage’s statement said, adding that there were more than 60 such grounds, “including health-related, prior criminal convictions, security reasons, public charge, labor certification, illegal entrants and immigration violations, documentation requirements, and miscellaneous grounds.” The statement did not indicate which grounds, if any, caused the British family to be denied entry.
  • The Guardian quoted Mohammad Tariq Mahmood, a member of the family stopped at Gatwick last week, saying, “It’s because of the attacks on America — they think every Muslim poses a threat.”
aqconces

'We are all Jews': World War II soldier saved POWs - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...us-pow-holocaust-hero

jews world war ii

shared by aqconces on 30 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • 'We are all Jews': World War II soldier honored for saving lives in POW camp
  • He took that secret to his grave when he died in 1985, two weeks shy of his 66th birthday: the story about the day he challenged the commander of the POW camp and saved all the Jews under his command.
  • On the prisoners' first day at the POW camp, the German intercom system in the American barracks crackled to life. Only the Jewish POWs were to fall out after morning roll call.
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  • At this point in the war, the Nazis were already implementing the Final Solution
  • their plan to wipe out the Jews of Europe that led to the killings of 6 million Jews at camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau
  • That plan now extended to Jewish POWs from the Allied armies.
  • "We're not going to do that," Edmonds told his men, some of them still remember 70 years later. "Geneva Convention affords only name, rank and serial number, and so that's what we're going to do. All of us are falling out."
  • Edmonds, a Christian, was true to his word. The next morning, all 1,275 soldiers stood at attention in front of their barracks. The commander of the camp was furious, storming up to Edmonds and shouting, "All of you can't be Jewish?!"
  • "We are all Jews here," Edmonds responded.
Javier E

History News Network | Jeffersonians Claimed Washington Was Hamilton's Dupe. They Were ... - 0 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...161617

history US Jefferson Washington Hamilton Founding

shared by Javier E on 07 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • In the end, Washington belatedly acknowledged Secretary of State Jefferson’s repeated attempts to undermine his policies, and in the final years of his life, he severed all contact with the Sage of Monticello
  • Jefferson reciprocated by refusing to attend the memorial service in the nation’s capital after Washington died, despite the fact that he was the sitting Vice President. Jefferson could hardly restrain his glee over the news of Washington’s passing
  • Americans should put aside the caricatured account of their early history that pits Jefferson against Hamilton, for Washington was as much a party to this confrontation as Hamilton. Despite his disdain for factions, Washington became the leading Federalist of his time, and his collaboration with Hamilton proved to be the critical alliance of the founding era.
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  • Conventional wisdom holds that the epic confrontation of the founding era occurred between Hamilton and Jefferson, with Washington somehow floating above it all, when in fact it occurred between Washington and Hamilton on one side and Jefferson and James Madison on the other
  • while Washington treated Jefferson with respect and attempted to mediate the Secretary of State’s disputes with Hamilton, he sided repeatedly with Hamilton during his eight years as president. In fact, despite Washington’s distaste for political parties, the Federalist’s party’s “platform” was as much Washington’s as it was Hamilton’s
  • For well over two hundred years, Thomas Jefferson and his admirers have had to choose between two unflattering interpretations of George Washington’s presidency. The nation’s first president was either an accomplice in implementing Alexander Hamilton’s “counterrevolutionary” policies or a trusting man who simply did not recognize Hamilton’s ill-intent. Many Jeffersonians embraced the latter position as the more palatable option – better to believe that an elderly, intellectually-challenged Washington was unaware of Hamilton’s schemes than that the “father” of his country was conspiring with a closet monarchist
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.
sarahbalick

Justice Department threatens legal action against Ferguson - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...80084794

justice department action ferguson

shared by sarahbalick on 10 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Justice Department threatens legal action against Ferguson
  • The Justice Department said Wednesday it is exploring "legal actions" against the city of Ferguson, hours after the city council in the St. Louis suburb called for several revisions to a tentative agreement to revamp its police department and municipal court operations.
  • The Justice Department rebuked the move and could file a civil rights suit against the city to enforce the agreement. Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department civil rights division, said in statement that the department will take "necessary legal actions to ensure that Ferguson’s policing and court practices comply with the Constitution and relevant federal laws.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • "In order to make sure this is a successful decree, we got to make sure that this something we can implement, something we can afford," Knowles said.
  • "Their vote to do so creates an unnecessary delay in the essential work to bring constitutional policing to the city and marks an unfortunate outcome for concerned community members and Ferguson police officers."
  • The Ferguson City Council has attempted to unilaterally amend the negotiated agreement,"
  • "This is not going away. We have to pay," Patricia Cowan, 54, told council members. "We need to think about where we’re at, and we need to move forward."
  • "My fear is that with your vote that Ferguson will cease to exist," said Susan Ankenbrand, 73, who has lived in the city for 41 years. "I would rather lose our city by fighting in court than losing it to DOJ’s crushing demands."
  • The tentative agreement reached last month calls for Ferguson to pay the cost of a Justice Department monitor for at least three years and purchase software and hire staff to maintain data on arrests, traffic stops and use-of-force incidents. It calls for a revision in the police department's training with an emphasis "toward de-escalation and avoiding force — particularly deadly force — except where necessary."
  • "since time immemorial"
  • “We reject this argument out of hand as an affront to democracy," said Sherilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "All public institutions, including police departments, must operate in accordance with the U.S. Constitution."
sarahbalick

France's Fabius leaves office, wider reshuffle due | Reuters - 0 views

in.reuters.com/...france-politics-idINKCN0VJ144

france leaves office

shared by sarahbalick on 10 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • France's Fabius leaves office, wider reshuffle due
  • French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius announced on Wednesday he was leaving the government ahead of a wider reshuffle that President Francois Hollande hopes can help bolster his chances for the 2017 presidential elections.
  • Fabius, 69, who played a prominent role in sealing an international deal with Iran limiting its nuclear programme and helped broker a global climate change deal, told reporters Wednesday's cabinet meeting would be his last before he took up a new post as head of the constitutional court.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "I will be leaving office," Fabius said.
  • This is a sensitive time for Hollande, whose plan to strip French citizenship from people convicted of terrorism is far from certain to be adopted despite passing a first hurdle in parliament on Tuesday.
  • But analysts said a reshuffle was unlikely to do much to help Hollande's popularity, which has been eroded by a debate on stripping dual nationals of their French passports in case of terrorism convictions - one of the key measures he announced after 130 people were killed by Islamist militants in Paris on November 13.
  • He is due to stay on as chair of U.N. climate talks until late 2016, monitoring implementation of the agreement to shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energies.
katyshannon

Supreme Court Deals Blow to Obama's Efforts to Regulate Coal Emissions - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oal-emissions-regulations.html

supreme court deals blow obama efforts coal emissions new york times US history crisis policy

shared by katyshannon on 11 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • In a major setback for President Obama’s climate change agenda, the Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants.
  • The brief order was not the last word on the case, which is most likely to return to the Supreme Court after an appeals court considers an expedited challenge from 29 states and dozens of corporations and industry groups.But the Supreme Court’s willingness to issue a stay while the case proceeds was an early hint that the program could face a skeptical reception from the justices.The 5-to-4 vote, with the court’s four liberal members dissenting, was unprecedented — the Supreme Court had never before granted a request to halt a regulation before review by a federal appeals court.
  • In negotiating that deal, which requires every country to enact policies to lower emissions, Mr. Obama pointed to the power plant rule as evidence that the United States would take ambitious action, and that other countries should follow.
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  • Opponents of Mr. Obama’s climate policy called the court’s action historic.“We are thrilled that the Supreme Court realized the rule’s immediate impact and froze its implementation, protecting workers and saving countless dollars as our fight against its legality continues,” said Patrick Morrisey, the attorney general of West Virginia, which has led the 29-state legal challenge.
  • The challenged regulation, which was issued last summer by the Environmental Protection Agency, requires states to make major cuts to greenhouse gas pollution created by electric power plants, the nation’s largest source of such emissions. The plan could transform the nation’s electricity system, cutting emissions from existing power plants by a third by 2030, from a 2005 baseline, by closing hundreds of heavily polluting coal-fired plants and increasing production of wind and solar power. Continue reading the main story
  • “Climate change is the most significant environmental challenge of our day, and it is already affecting national public health, welfare and the environment,” Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. wrote in a brief urging the Supreme Court to reject a request for a stay while the case moves forward.
  • The regulation calls for states to submit compliance plans by September, though they may seek a two-year extension. The first deadline for power plants to reduce their emissions is in 2022, with full compliance not required until 2030.The states challenging the regulation, led mostly by Republicans and many with economies that rely on coal mining or coal-fired power, sued to stop what they called “the most far-reaching and burdensome rule the E.P.A. has ever forced onto the states.”
  • The states urged the Supreme Court to take immediate action to block what they called a “power grab” under which “the federal environmental regulator seeks to reorganize the energy grids in nearly every state in the nation.” Though the first emission reduction obligations do not take effect until 2022, the states said they had already started to spend money and shift resources.
jongardner04

Ukraine crisis: Growing sense of despair - CNN.com - 0 views

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

ukraine crisis

shared by jongardner04 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Ukraine's prolonged crisis and political stalemate are causing a growing sense of despair and isolation among millions living in the conflict zone, the United Nations warned in a report released Thursday.
  • It describes "a complete absence of rule of law, reports of arbitrary detention, torture and no access to real redress mechanisms," with documented allegations of violations committed by both separatists and Ukrainian forces.
  • Thursdays' Normandy format meeting in Paris between the foreign ministers of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany proved that despite some progress, major disagreements persist. The meeting was part of steps for the implementation of the Minsk accord.
Javier E

History News Network | 4 Things We Believed a Century Ago - And Need to Remember Now - 0 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...161981

progressive principles beliefs history politics culture economics government regulation information US

shared by Javier E on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • We are not the first – or the last – to feel that markets beyond our ken and beyond our control shape the realities of our lives, draw in the horizons of our aspirations.
  • We live in an impoverished age. Not a poverty of money, but a poverty of ideas, a poverty of possibilities. A century ago, anything was possible, but today we have convinced ourselves that nothing can be done.
  • A generation has come of age, and come to power, which can hardly remember when government was not the problem. We need new policies, based on new values if we hope to exert democratic control over the complex economic activity that governs our lives.
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  • But they are not all that new, and to find these policies and values, we need new histories. Here are four things people believed a century ago, before our impoverished era:
  • 1) People in a democracy have a right to control the parameters of economic activity that shapes their lives. Debate about this could be framed as a debate about where to draw lines in the economy between things that are tightly governed and things that are not
  • 2) People in a democracy have a right to gather information about businesses and use that information in the regulation of business.
  • he aspects of business that touch upon the public lives of the people they come into contact with must not be hidden if we are to govern business fairly. Even such simple things as who owns a company, how much money it earns, how much (and how) it pays its employees and investors, how much (or whether) it pays in taxes are routinely hidden, guarded by lawyers and phrases such as “commercial sensitivity.”
  • 3) There is no such thing as an abstract “market” separate from government. Ever since kings issued royal charters, markets have operated in public spaces under the control of government.
  • 4) Not all business is bad. In almost any sector, in almost any time, there are examples of good practice, of business operating fairly, openly, legally, to the benefit of its employees, its investors, and the public at large. All too often, such companies are at a disadvantage compared to those less scrupulous. Without good governance, it is a race to the bottom.
  • These are not new ideas. They were articulated, argued over, and implemented long ago, in the Progressive Era. They were the basis of decades of prosperity and the greatest advances in democracy and equality the United States has seen. We need to reread our own history.
Javier E

The Amazing Trump-Wingnut Policy Conveyor Belt - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...p-wingnut-policy-conveyor-belt

legitimacy discourse politics extremism radical candidate 2016

shared by Javier E on 21 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Over the course of just a few days Donald Trump has gone from saying that we might have to close down mosques and create a Muslim registry to saying that not only will we do this but we have to do it and anything less is an utter capitulation.
  • In other words, rapidly evolving from refusing to rule out a draconian policy to affirmatively endorsing it to being its leading advocate.
  • With his Muslim ID card and database, Wednesday he said he wouldn't rule out creating such a system. By the end of the day he was telling NBC News he would "absolutely" create such a system.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • just as we saw in the summer with immigration writ large, the progression doesn't end with Trump. We've had three presidential elections since the 9/11 terror attacks and no presidential candidate has ever proposed shutting down mosques in the United States or creating a special registry and identification cards for Muslims living in the United States.
  • So yesterday Megyn Kelly asked Marco Rubio whether he'd shut down radical mosques like Trump. He tried to deflect the question by saying that it wasn't about mosques but closing down any facility that was promoting radicalism. In other words, Rubio, while clearly not eager to answer the question, pointedly refused to rule out following Trump's lead.
  • It is a very good example of how Trump is not only shaping the debate on the right but rapidly mainstreaming ideas that were as recently as a week ago considered entirely outside the realm of mainstream political discourse.
  • It's particularly effective with the less sophisticated and principled candidates like Rubio. Jeb Bush said flatly this morning that Trump's database proposal is "just wrong." But Ben Carson quickly took Trump's lead comparing Syrian refugees to "mad dogs." The difference is that Marco Rubio could very well be president in 18 months. Jeb Bush won't be.
  • this is no longer a matter of Trump yakking on about building a gilded 100-foot wall along the southern border and having Mexico agree to pay for it. Trump is now proposing things that sound like they put millions of American citizens and resident aliens on a road to something like the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
maddieireland334

Testing U.S. Education Policies in Brazil - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...419967

education Brazil policy US

shared by maddieireland334 on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • maddieireland334 on 14 Dec 15
     
    The country has implemented a series of strategies including pay-for-performance and charter schools, modeled after the American system. Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > As in the United States, the debate over this subject is affected strongly by ideology in Brazil.
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