Group items tagged

But the most important, most dangerous part of all this was Trump’s successful attempt to convince millions of his supporters that he’d won and was being cheated out of his win—and the fact that many leaders of the Republican Party, at all levels, went along. That claim is somewhat akin to a charge of child abuse—the very accusation is also a demand for immediate action to stop it. The mob that gathered last Wednesday took that accusation seriously, and acted to “stop the steal.”

There is a great desire to blame Trump—who is certainly very much to blame—and move on, without recognizing and responding to the dire reality: that much of the GOP enlisted in his attempt to steal an election.

The legislators were there to count the votes certified by the states—after months of review by election officials, and after endless court challenges were rebuffed—and, instead, they voted to throw them out. They did this after months of lying to the public, saying that the election had been stolen. They crossed every line a democracy should hold dear. To my knowledge, not one of them has yet apologized or recanted for their participation in what even some Republican senators are openly calling the “big lie.”

Some, like Senator Ted Cruz, have tried to cover up their attempt to overturn the election by saying that their constituents (and indeed tens of millions of Americans) believe that the election was stolen, and that they were merely honoring their beliefs. However, it was they, along with the president, who convinced those millions of people that the election was stolen in the first place, and that Joe Biden was not the legitimate president-elect

Some legislators have since tried to argue that they didn’t mean to “overturn” the election, that their action was more akin to a protest vote. This cannot be taken seriously. That’s like pulling a gun on somebody, walking away with their wallet, and then claiming that you never intended to shoot them if they hadn’t turned over their wallet.

A mugging is a mugging, and a mass of legislators claiming that the election was stolen and rejecting the results is an attempt to overturn the election. When the president himself refuses to concede, voting against the recognition of electoral votes cannot simply be a protest, and we don’t have to accept such absurdity at face value.

Already, there are signs that many in the GOP intend to respond to their loss in the Senate by doubling down on disenfranchising voters in the name of fighting the “election fraud” they falsely convinced millions is widespread

Today, by contrast, many GOP legislators have claimed for months that the election was fraudulent or stolen, and have explicitly and repeatedly called on their supporters to stop this fraud. The president not only refused to concede before they took their vote, but even as the storming of the Capitol was still under way, he once again claimed that he had won in a landslide.

A great misunderstanding about democracy is that it can be stolen or damaged only if formal rules are suspended or ignored. In fact, many authoritarian regimes are sticklers about formal rules, even as they undermine their meaning

We’ve already witnessed the hollowing out of some of the core tenets of liberal democracy—equal representation of voters, unimpeded access to the ballot—in many aspects of our electoral system. Republicans have pursued a project of minority rule for decades, exploiting structural features of American politics and opportunistically shaping rules in their own favor.

The Senate is structurally dominated by a minority—less than 20 percent of the population elects a majority of its members. Through gerrymandering and the uneven distribution of the population, the GOP does about 6 percent better in the median House district than it does in the national popular vote.

Some Republicans have raised the fact that the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, referred to Trump’s presidency as “illegitimate.” That may well be, but that happened long after the election was over and the transition was complete. She called Trump to concede less than 12 hours after the polls closed, and the Obama administration immediately started the transition process. There was no formal challenge that required suspending the session to debate whether to accept the actual results.

The Republicans who backed Trump’s effort to overturn the election may have known that it didn’t have a high chance of success, but that doesn’t change the nature of the attempt, especially given their lack of remorse or apology. Unless they are convinced that it was a mistake—unless they pay such a high political price for it that neither they nor anyone else thinks of trying again—they are likely to seize the next available opportunity to do the same. If a future election comes down to one state instead of three, if a future presidential candidate uses lawsuits and coercion more competently, or if a few election officials succumb to threats more easily, they’ll be in the game.

A line must be drawn. The increasing entrenchment of minority rule and democratic backsliding in almost every level of government was terrible enough, but now we’ve even moved past that.

Democrats will soon control the House, the Senate, and the presidency, making it possible for them to undertake crucial reforms on voting rights and electoral integrity. Perhaps some Republicans will decide to join them; if there ever were a time for putting country over party, this is surely it.

Ben Carson, another staunch Trump defender, gave Mitt Romney $1,000 in April 2012 but nothing to Trump this cycle.

t. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former Defense Intelligence Agency director turned Trump warm-up act, has not given the candidate a dime. Neither has Governor Chris Christie

Many of Trump’s surrogates, who have been generous in previous campaigns, this year have kept their wallets closed to The Donald.

Ivanka Trump, who previously contributed to Hillary Clinton and John McCain in 2007 and 2008 respectively, does not appear to have given to her father.

And contributions below $200 are not required to be reported by presidential campaigns.

The kind of anything goes rule when it comes to donations applies evenly to both candidates in the race and some of Clinton’s team is not on record providing contributions either.

However, Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta appears to have given $2,700 on April 16, 2015. And Chelsea Clinton gave her mother’s campaign $2,700 on Jan. 21, 2016. There are also documented contributions from newly-appointed Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile, Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook, and former strategist for President Obama David Axelrod.

One major Clinton surrogate who is noticeably absent from her extensive list of contributors is billionaire Mark Cuban who has been a public thorn in Trump’s side.

And by September, Trump had paid his own businesses around $8.2 million, comprised of rent, food, and facilities and payroll for corporate staffers. He even used tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations to buy copies of his own book.

Meanwhile, Trump is still asserting that he will invest $100 million in his own campaign

For their part, Third Way representatives bristle at the idea they are doing the bidding of Wall Street power brokers.

The philosophy set out by Third Way will be part of that conversation.

Third Way raises just over a third of its $9.3 million annual budget from undisclosed corporations. The remainder, the bulk of its funding, is donated by individuals, almost all of whom are members of Third Way’s board of trustees.

Both Vogelstein and Heller were major financial backers of Obama, and all three contributed heavily to Senate Democrats.

“We’re not remotely aligned with what Wall Street wants,” said Jonathan Cowan, the group’s president and cofounder.

“It goes back to what Bill Clinton said, which is ‘You can’t love the job and hate the job creators,’ ” said Matt Bennett, Third Way’s vice president for public affairs and one of its cofounders. “Vilification of industry isn’t helping Democrats.”

They insist on deficit reduction and entitlement cuts as conditions for key tax hikes on the wealthy.

Third Way’s insistence on linking tax hikes to a grand bargain — which has been impossible to obtain in the Obama era — has a direct bearing on the wallets of the group’s wealthy funders.

“If the Democratic Party stands only for raising taxes on the wealthy, not for actually making entitlement reforms and other spending cuts,’’ he said, “then the other half of the equation will never happen.”

Bennett said it should not be characterized as a donation from Goldman Sachs, but as a personal contribution from Heller that was made through the Goldman charity.

Though Third Way does not report details of its contributions, some of its donors do so through private foundations.

Third Way’s 2012 tax filing. Peck Madigan, which did not respond to e-mailed questions, lobbies for several Wall Street-tied clients, including MasterCard, Deutsche Bank, and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association.

There are two kinds of shoppers, says Brett Gordon, a professor at Columbia Business School. There's the bargain-hunter and the clock-watcher. If the first walks into a store without a bargain, she leaves. But the second customer isn't looking for markdowns. She's looking at her watch. She just wants what she wants, and fast, coupons or no.

IMG is at the forefront. It is trying to enhance its academy brand with football, perhaps the most visible sport. And it is applying a business model to the gridiron that has long been profitable for tennis and has expanded to golf, soccer, baseball, basketball, lacrosse, and track and field. The academy has nearly 1,000 students from more than 80 countries enrolled in prekindergarten through 12th grade and postgraduation. About half the students are international.

Although it is private, IMG Academy has received more than $7 million from the Florida state budget over the past two years, according to news accounts. An additional $2 million was pledged by lawmakers in June but was then vetoed by Gov. Rick Scott.

The full cost of tuition and boarding for a year of football at IMG Academy is $70,800, although need-based financial assistance is available. School officials would not provide specific figures, but they said that payments by families could range from tens of thousands of dollars to a competition fee (between $3,750 and $4,500) to nothing.

IMG bought the academy in 1987, and it now covers more than 500 acres. Football began in 2013 as part of a $197 million campus expansion. Games are played in a 5,000-seat stadium outfitted with suites and a jumbo video screen. Digital screens depict each player’s name and face on his locker. Some N.F.L. players train there in the off-season, as do college players preparing for the pro draft.

The school, 45 miles south of Tampa, recruits football players from around the country, offering high-performance training, college preparatory courses, coaches with N.F.L. playing experience, facilities that resemble a small college more than a high school, and a chance to play a national schedule and on national television on ESPN against some of the country’s highest-rated teams.

Mickey McCarty, who has coached three state championship teams at Neville High School in Monroe, La., and who lost a senior receiver to IMG Academy days before fall practice began, said the academy seemed less a traditional football team than a showcase for individual talent.

Many high school football coaches and officials are closely following IMG Academy, wondering whether it portends the growth of similar academies or superleagues featuring top teams.

“I’m 50-50 split,” said John Wilkinson, the coach at Cocoa High School, who faced IMG Academy last week and said he would do it again. “They’re high school kids, just like us. We’re playing a football game. The other 50 percent thinks the competitive advantage they have is kind of alarming, if they’re allowed to recruit. But it is what it is.”

Other officials express fear that football might follow the path of high school basketball, which many feel has been corrupted by so-called diploma mills and the heavy influence of club teams and recruiting middlemen.

“We run a business,” said Chip McCarthy, a co-managing director of IMG Academy. “We call it sales and marketing. Some people call it recruiting. We’re promoting our program. If you look at any private school that emphasizes sports, they’re typically doing it to promote their school. A lot are trying to survive. You’re not going to curtail that.”

“It sounds to me like they’re playing for self, to be promoted and recruited, which takes away everything we stand for,” McCarty said.

Academy officials said that 186 athletes from IMG’s 2015 graduating class were playing various college sports, including six at Ivy League universities and four at service academies. Academics and athletics are intended to simulate the college experience with dormitory living, alternate-day classes, block scheduling and a focus on time management.

“I came here assuming it was going to be easy, it’s just going to be a football school, but I learned within the first week I was completely wrong,” said Kjetil Cline, 17, a senior receiver from Minnesota who plans to play football at the United States Military Academy. “That really opened my eyes about what college would be like, and I think it’s really prepared me for going to West Point and being able to handle that.”

“Academy teams, while they may be good teams and give great educations, it’s not something that we really believe in or would promote or espouse in any way. We think the high school experience is best served by the student-athlete who lives at home with his family and is part of his school, family and community.”

The players at IMG and their families consider that approach to be antiquated. For Patterson, a quarterback who won state championships the previous two seasons at a high school in Louisiana, IMG Academy is serving as a finishing school.

Patterson said he transferred to IMG in June to work on his speed, strength and conditioning. He plans to graduate in December, enroll for the spring semester at the University of Mississippi and challenge for the starting quarterback position there next fall as a freshman.“It’s definitely a professional decision,” he said.

teve Walsh, IMG Academy’s director of football, and Rich Bartel, the offensive coordinator, both played quarterback in the N.F.L. There are also sports psychologists, strength coaches and speed coaches to assist Patterson. He has at his disposal a 10,000-square-foot weight room; a sports science center to aid with hydration and nutrition; a biomechanics center; a vision lab, or “mind gym,” to enhance perceptual and cognitive skills; and a hospital for special surgery and sports rehabilitation should he be injured.

When IMG Academy played in Texas this month, it trained at Texas Christian University, and Wright, the Ascenders’ coach, said, “We’re thinking, ‘Hey, our practice fields are maybe a little bit better.’ ”

At the top levels of high school football, some teams routinely travel to play teams in other states. Games are frequently broadcast on regional or national cable channels. Some players are offered college scholarships as early as eighth grade.

“It’s all driven by money, and you can’t beat money,” said John Bachman Sr., who coached Patterson to state titles the past two seasons at Calvary Baptist Academy in Shreveport, La. As a freshman, Patterson played at a high school in Texas.

Even so, he added, “I don’t think anything’s ever going to take the place of the local public high school or private school that pours itself into the kid, and it’s a family atmosphere and it’s about the team and sacrifice and so on.”

Sean Patterson Sr., Shea’s father, said, “If your son’s a great musician, you want to send him to Juilliard,” adding that for Shea, IMG Academy “is the spot” for polishing his football skills for college.

For years, observers have wondered if Amazon’s shopping business — you know, its main business — could ever really work. Investors gave Mr. Bezos enormous leeway to spend billions building out a distribution-center infrastructure, but it remained a semi-open question if the scale and pace of investments would ever pay off. Could this company ever make a whole lot of money selling so much for so little?

Amazon’s retail operations had reached a “critical scale” or an “inflection point.” They meant that Amazon’s enormous investments in infrastructure and logistics have begun to pay off. The company keeps capturing a larger slice of American and even international purchases. It keeps attracting more users to its Prime fast-shipping subscription program, and, albeit slowly, it is beginning to scratch out higher profits from shoppers.

Now that Amazon has hit this point, it’s difficult to see how any other retailer could catch up anytime soon. I recently asked a couple of Silicon Valley venture capitalists who have previously made huge investments in e-commerce whether they were keen to spend any more in the sector. They weren’t, citing Amazon.

“The truth is they’re building a really insurmountable infrastructure that I don’t see how others can really deal with,”

Amazon also faces a wider set of competitive threats internationally. Although it has reported increasingly brisk sales in India, the company has had a difficult time breaking into the lucrative Chinese market, where Alibaba dominates the shopping scene

Walmart, which on Tuesday published earnings that came in slightly above analysts’ expectations, is also spending billions to slow Amazon’s roll. But Walmart said that in its latest quarter, e-commerce sales had grown only 10 percent from a year ago. Amazon’s retail sales rose 20 percent during the same period.

What has been key to this rise, and missing from many of his competitors’ efforts, is patience. In a very old-fashioned manner, one that is far out of step with a corporate world in which milestones are measured every three months, Amazon has been willing to build its empire methodically and at great cost over almost two decades, despite skepticism from many sectors of the business world.

Amazon has built more than 100 warehouses from which to package and ship goods, and it hasn’t really slowed its pace in establishing more. Because the warehouses speed up Amazon’s shipping, encouraging more shopping, the costs of these centers is becoming an ever-smaller fraction of Amazon’s operations.

Amazon’s investments in Prime, the $99-a-year service that offers free two-day shipping, are also paying off. Last year Mr. Bezos told me that people were increasingly signing up for Prime for the company’s media offerings

Mr. Schachter, of Macquarie Securities, estimates that there will be at least 40 million Prime subscribers by the end of this year, and perhaps as many as 60 million, up from an estimated 30 million at the beginning of 2015

he predicted that by 2020, 50 percent of American households will have joined Prime, “and that’s very conservative,” he said.

its operating margin on the North American retail business was 3.5 percent, while Amazon Web Services’s margin was 25 percent.

“retail gross profit dollars per customer” — a fancy way of measuring how much Amazon makes from each shopper — has accelerated in each of the last four quarters, in part because of Prime. Amazon keeps winning “a larger share of customers’ wallets,” the firm said, eventually “leading to a period of sustained, rising profitability.”

“The thing about retail is, the consumer has near-perfect information,” said Paul Vogel, an analyst at Barclays. “So what’s the differentiator at this point? It’s selection. It’s service. It’s convenience. It’s how easy it is to use their interface. And Amazon’s got all this stuff already. How do you compete with that? I don’t know, man. It’s really hard.

Both Yahoo and Verizon have staked their future on mobile Internet and video growth. On paper, a deal would make sense. New York-based Verizon has already shown a willingness to buy Internet properties with its $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL in June. Yahoo’s Web business, which could fetch a price of $3 billion to $3.5 billion, based on analysts’ estimates, will be spun out as part of Yahoo’s tax-saving move to return the value of its $31 billion stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to shareholders.

Yahoo’s board has said that it’s not putting the company up for sale, and that the move is the best way to deal with the Alibaba holdings.

"Yahoo would help check several boxes in what Verizon is looking to build at the moment with a cross-platform ad strategy and new video offerings," said Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research LLC.

Yahoo’s mail, finance, sports and video sites attract more than 1 billion users, a prized asset that would add to AOL’s 2 million users. That kind of Web traffic, along with exclusive content, is just what Verizon, with more than 105 million wireless subscribers, needs to lure and retain a new smartphone-addicted generation.

A Yahoo deal would also give Verizon a new source of revenue, through online advertising, especially from Yahoo’s video-ad unit Brightroll. Verizon has introduced an ad-supported mobile-video service called go90 (named for tilting small screens 90 degrees to watch videos). By seeking users and marketers, Verizon is essentially bulking up to compete with the likes of Facebook Inc. and Google, which are starting to move into the Internet space as a way to drive more users to their online properties.

"Verizon is vying to get a larger share of advertisers’ wallets and adding Yahoo would help strengthen AOL as the No. 3 player," said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group. "Yahoo has a lot of users in a well defined environment. That is very valuable to advertisers."

As the Syrian conflict began to encroach on a corner of the country spared early in the war, the teenager traveled to a training camp in Iraq’s remote Qandil Mountains. Soon Islamic State began seizing large parts of Syria, including some Kurdish areas, and she headed to the war’s front lines.

At first her father, who had been arrested several times by the Syrian government because of his membership in a Kurdish political party, resisted because of her age. But her mother knew she couldn’t stop her daughter from joining a cause they had trumpeted all her life.

A portrait of Abdullah Ocalan —the jailed leader of the PKK Kurdish separatist  movement in neighboring Turkey and founder of its many affiliates, including what evolved into the YPG—hangs in the family’s living room.

In the years she was away, Ms. Ali only wrote three letters, sending them home via a modern day pony express by pick-up truck rather than horseback. Her mother keeps them carefully folded up in a leather wallet. One she wrote before participating in battle for the first time. The other is a poem of yearning:

The rise of China’s venture market “signifies a shift from a single-epicenter view of the world to a duopoly,” he says.

The surge also positions Asia’s investors to win stakes in markets that Western companies covet, or that have national security implications.

. “If you think that being the locus of invention gives you a boost to your GDP and so forth, that’s a deterioration of the U.S. competitive advantage.”

Although one of the biggest Asian investors is Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. , which has tapped Middle Eastern money to create the world’s largest tech-investment fund, it is Chinese activity that is having the greatest impact.

China is creating unicorns—startups valued at a billion dollars or more—at much the same pace as the U.S., drawing on funding from internet giants like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. as well as more than a thousand domestic venture-capital firms that have raised billions of dollars a year for the past few year

Chinese-led venture funding is about 15 times its size in 2013, outpacing growth in U.S.-led financing, which roughly doubled in that time period

Most Chinese-led investment so far has gone to the country’s own firms, the Journal analysis found. Many of them, like the Yelp equivalent Meituan-Dianping, are household names with millions of customers in China, yet virtually unknown elsewhere.

Many Chinese tech companies are “at this critical size that the China market alone is not enough to support their business and valuation,

Madhur Deora, chief financial officer for Paytm, one of India’s biggest e-payments firms, says the company approached Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial instead of U.S. backers for funding in 2015 because Chinese mobile-internet innovations are “way far ahead of anything that’s happened in the U.S.

One reason China’s push into new technologies worries many in the U.S. is that, unlike the hunt for good returns that underpins most Western venture finance, a lot of Chinese investment is driven by strategic interests, some carrying the specter of state influence.

China is pushing hard into semiconductors, for which the government has provided billions of dollars in public funding, and artificial intelligence, where Beijing in July set a goal of global leadership by 2030

Mr. Lee, the venture investor, predicts that in the next five to 10 years Chinese tech companies will become pacesetters for tech-related development, vying with the likes of Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook for dominance in markets outside the English-speaking world and Western Europe.

“All the rest of the world will basically be a land grab between the U.S. and China,

“The U.S. approach is: We’ll build a better product and just win over all the countries,” says Mr. Lee. The Chinese approach is “we’ll fund the local partner to beat off the American companies.”

Asia’s rise as a startup financier is even starker in the biggest venture investments—those of $100 million or more. These megadeals have become an increasingly important part of venture finance as valuations have ballooned, with their proportion of deal volume growing from around 8% in 2007 to around half of the total last year.

In Southeast Asia, a flood of Chinese money into local startups—such as the $1.1 billion Alibaba-led investment into Indonesian online marketplace PT Tokopedia last year—is drawing the region closer to China

Chinese money is also playing a big role in India, which, with a population of 1.2 billion, has been described as the next big internet market. Chinese and Japanese investors each led nearly $3 billion in venture finance in India last year, ahead of the nearly $2 billion in deals led by U.S. investors

“Think of strategic investments and M&A as playing a game of go,” said Mr. Tsai, the Alibaba executive vice chairman, at the investor conference last year. “In a game of go the strategic objective is to put your pieces on the chessboard and surround your opponent.”

President Trump, who was critical of China’s trade practices well before he entered the White House, appeared unperturbed about the possibility of a trade war. He asserted Wednesday the annual $500 billion U.S. trade deficit with China means “you can’t lose,” and that intellectual-property theft was costing the U.S. another $300 billion.

At the moment though, American consumers needn’t worry, Kennedy said, because “the products that the Americans have put penalties on and those that the Chinese have responded with aren’t primarily products that American consumers are going to miss on their shelves.”

But, he added, the trade threats initially resulted in a broad decline in U.S —and global—stock markets. “The primary way American consumers are going to feel pain in the short terms is in their portfolios,” Kennedy said. “So, it’ll affect folks’ savings, and that, in turn, affects their discretionary spending. So it’s that indirect effect that in the short term has the bigger effect.”

The U.S. and China need each other. Trade between the two countries was worth $648.5 billion in 2016. And the trade dispute could ultimately affect companies like Apple, which makes its iPhone in China. Tech companies not only need China to make their products, but also China’s massive consumer market to sell them.

This is why presidents are surrounded by elaborate staff systems to help them—and oblige them—to think through their words and actions.  

Through his first months in office, Trump threw his power about as if it were an infinite resource. He growled threats, issued commands, picked quarrels, and played favorites.

His idea of foreign policy is to bark orders like an emperor, without thinking very hard about how to enforce compliance or what to do if compliance is not forthcoming.

First, because he talked so much and tweeted so much, he revealed much more of himself much earlier than other presidents

Second, foreign leaders have concluded that the shortest path to Trump’s heart runs through his wallet

Third, Trump’s highly suspicious dealings with Russia before the election potentially put him at the mercy of countries in a position to embarrass him

At a time of relatively low military casualties and strong job growth, the president’s popularity at home roughly matches that of George W. Bush’s during the worst months of the Iraq war, 2005–2006, and Barack Obama’s during the most disappointing months of the weak recovery from the recession of 2009. The president’s options are narrowing even before the midterm elections.

America’s friends are turning their backs fast. (Only 17 percent of South Koreans trust Trump to do the right thing, according to the Pew global surveyin 2017, well before the latest chaos. Obama’s trust rating in South Korea bounced between a low of 75 percent and a high of 88 percent over his presidency.

All this is only the beginning. Deficits are rising fast. Military commitments are rising fast

starting in late 1940, the Reimanns routinely took advantage of forced labor: men and women taken from their homes in Nazi-occupied territories, as well as prisoners of war, who were allocated by the Nazis to farms and industrial companies across Germany.

Mr. Harf noted that he lived in three places — New York, London and Milan — where nationalism and ethnic division were on the rise. For most of his long career, he said, he considered shareholder capitalism to be value neutral. No longer. In the age of Trump, Brexit and Matteo Salvini, he said, businesses can no longer pretend that they are operating in a “value-free space.”

“This is once again a time when everybody needs to take a stance,” Mr. Harf said. “I’m very scared of what’s happening.”

the men gave the company a makeover in keeping with Nazi principles. By the time Hitler took over, Benckiser already housed a Nationalist Socialist Company Organization — a worker council that sought to uphold Nazi ideology. It later became a “model NS plant.”

“Reimann Sr. and Reimann Jr. were not just opportunistic followers of the regime,” Mr. Harf said. “They were fully signed up to the Nazi project.”

In 1933, it employed 181 people. As an important supplier to the food industry, Benckiser benefited from the Nazi system, more than tripling sales over the next decade. Mr. Reimann Sr. served as president of the regional Chamber of Industry and Commerce, which helped orchestrate the Aryanization, expropriation and expulsion of Jewish businesses

Its employees — there are 180,000 around the world — have reported that customers accuse them of “working for Nazis

It was around this time that Emilie Landecker started working in the accounting department as a clerk

According to Mr. Harf, Benckiser’s use of forced laborers grew so fast that she would surely have been aware of the abuses.

By 1943, 175 people, or a third of the total work force, were forced laborers, most of them from France and Eastern Europe. Benckiser operated two labor camps, one of them overseen by a brutal foreman, Paul Werneburg, who had been with the company since 1910. On his watch, female workers were forced to stand at attention naked outside their barracks, and those who refused risked sexual abuse. Workers were kicked and beaten, among them a Ukrainian woman who also cleaned in the Reimanns’ private villa.

During a bomb raid on Jan. 7, 1945, Werneburg threw dozens of workers out of a camp bomb shelter. Thirty were injured, and one died. As word of Werneburg’s brutality spread, even the local Nazi office in charge of allocating forced laborers reprimanded the Reimanns for mistreating their workers.

Ms. Landecker would have witnessed it all, said her son, Wolfgang Reimann, in an email. “She lived through the horror show happening in our own company,” he said. “She probably sat in the very bunker when Werneburg threw out the workers.”

Mr. Reimann Jr. wrote a letter to the commanding officer on Sept. 22, dismissing allegations that he had been an “early and enthusiastic Nazi” as mere “denunciations” — and insisting that he was in fact a victim of the Nazis.

It worked. While the French initially barred Mr. Reimann Jr. from continuing his business activities, American officials overturned the judgment, classifying him as a “follower” of Nazism, rather than an active Nazi himself.

In 1947, the wealth of the Reimann family totaled 686,000 Reichsmark, or approximately $2.4 million in today’s money. Over the decades, the fortune grew in step with Benckiser and its successor companies, and today the family’s worth is estimated at €33 billion. On one recent list of the wealthiest families in Germany, the Reimanns ranked second.

Ms. Landecker was at work at Benckiser when the Gestapo came for her father.It was April 24, 1942

A few weeks later, one last letter arrived from Mr. Landecker, but only the envelope has survived. It shows that he was interned in block III 416/2 in Izbica, a ghetto serving as a transfer point for the deportation of Jews to the Belzec and Sobibor death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Mr. Harf said it made him think that not enough voices in business were speaking up against the re-emergence of nationalism and populism in Europe and the United States.

“We fought for five years only to have an age like this,” he wrote, referring to World War I. “I hope you, my dear children, remain well-behaved and good, and keep loving me, even if you suffer because of me.”

he had a brother and sister-in-law. “Aunt Pauline has written from America,” he wrote that December. “She is trying for us, maybe things will work out.” But there wasn’t enough money. Mr. Landecker was not allowed to work, which meant that Emilie, still a teenager, became the family’s only earner.

he wrote his last letter to Bavaria.“My dear Gerdele,” he wrote. “As you can see, I’m still here, but not for long. Today I learned that my departure is on the 24th of the month — in two days. So this is the last letter that you receive from me from here or perhaps ever. We don’t know what is waiting for us.”

“You won’t be able to marry here in Germany,” he continued. “Learn languages!! You have your future ahead of you — don’t waste it.”

No one knows when exactly their love affair started. But in 1951, their first child was born

Two more followed. Twice a week, every Sunday and Wednesday, Mr. Reimann Jr. would leave his wife and visit Ms. Landecker.

years later, she admitted in a letter to Mr. Reimann Jr. that she always missed not being his wife — and not having a regular family

Ms. Landecker was a quiet woman. She did not speak much. But her children say that despite everything, she loved their father. “I never understood why,” said Wolfgang Reimann. “He was not very lovable from my perspective.”

“My mother never said anything,” Wolfgang Reimann said. “For the longest time, I believed it was her personality.” But he has changed his mind. “If I had to live with the love of my life, as my mother did, and this person was also responsible for the terrible things that happened during the war, I would not have spoken much, either, I guess,

the Reimanns channeled much of their wealth into JAB. In recent years the holding company has spent billions to become a rival to the likes of Starbucks and Nestlé by buying chains including Panera Bread, Krispy Kreme and Pret A Manger. Last year, it also helped Keurig Green Mountain buy Dr Pepper Snapple for nearly $19 billion. JAB also controls the cosmetics giant Coty, the owner of Calvin Klein fragrances

“When I heard and read of the atrocities committed at Benckiser, sanctioned by my grandfather, I felt like throwing up,” said Martin Reimann, 30, who is a grandchild to Ms. Landecker and Mr. Reimann Jr. “I cannot claim that I was very interested in politics before. I was just living my life. But after what happened, I changed my mind. I have to do something. In our family council, the younger generation created a little bit of a rebellion.”

By renaming its foundation after Alfred Landecker, the Reimann family is bringing back one name from the millions killed by the Nazis. But it is also explicitly linking the memory of crimes past to today’s fight to preserve the values of liberal democracy.

“What we can learn from history and how we can learn from history is at the core of this foundation,”

“This is not just about researching and remembering the past,” he added. “It’s about stabilizing and maintaining democracy today.”

Mr. Harf, JAB’s chairman, agrees. He said he had recently read “The Order of the Day,” a historic novella by Éric Vuillard set in the years before World War II. One scene takes place in February 1933, when Hitler and the president of the Reichstag encourage 24 German industrialists to donate to the Nazi party. The businessmen — representing companies that are still prominent German corporate names, like Siemens, Bayer and Allianz — duly open their wallets.

Mr. Landecker did two things that would prove prescient. He made sure his children were baptized Catholic, like his late wife. And he officially transferred to them his main possessions, including the family apartment, so that they could not be expropriated.

Every time business leaders make decisions, he said, they should ask, “What does this mean for our children? What does it mean for the future?”

“In history, businesses have enabled populists,” he added. “We mustn’t make the same mistake today.” Then he quoted the Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal: “For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”

He added, “As the successors and descendants of people who committed horrendous acts, it is vital that our generation accepts what has happened, that we do whatever we can to bring tolerance and equality to the communities in which we live

In Taiwan, officials boarded planes arriving from Wuhan and assessed passengers for symptoms before allowing anyone to disembark. Within days, Singapore, South Korea and other Asian states had implemented similar steps.

A year after SARS, Taiwan established a National Health Command Center that brought together all levels and branches of government, preparing for the possibility of another disease outbreak. Its interventions over the past two months have been decisive in keeping Taiwan ahead of the curve

They didn’t hesitate, they didn’t want to die,” Wang said. “The mortality rate was so high [during SARS] and they didn’t know how bad this one was going to be. Nobody thought it was like the flu.”

As early as Jan. 5, Taiwan was tracing people who had been in Wuhan in the previous 14 days. Those with symptoms of respiratory infections were quarantined.

In subsequent weeks, authorities used data and technology to identify and track cases, communicated effectively to reassure the public, offered relief to businesses and allocated medical resources where they were needed most — rationing face masks and dramatically increasing their production.

On Jan. 27, Taiwan combined the databases of its National Health Insurance Administration and National Immigration Agency, allowing it to track everyone who had been in Wuhan in the recent past and alert doctors to patients’ travel histories

Now, Taiwan is hoping to keep its infection numbers down and has asked residents not to travel abroad after its biggest single-day jump of cases — 23 — on Wednesday. It is also barring most noncitizens from entering.

South Korea, meanwhile, has become the poster child for testing. Its success is rooted in a previous failure: The limited availability of test kits was seen as having aggravated the 2015 MERS outbreak, when the country suffered the second-highest caseload after Saudi Arabia.

More than 260,000 people in South Korea have been tested for the virus, the highest per capita anywhere, with testing and treatment fees covered by the government and drive-through centers capturing global attention

Whereas the United States and Japan keep testing tightly controlled by a central authority, South Korea opened the process to the private sector, introducing a path to grant “emergency usage approval” to tests for pathogens of pandemic potential.

Singapore, too, benefited from its own capabilities to test, as did Hong Kong and Japan. All developed their own diagnostic tests when the covid-19 genome sequence was published.

Outside mainland China, the territory had been the biggest casualty of the Communist Party’s coverup of the SARS outbreak, with some 300 deaths and little clarity on what was unfolding until it was too late.

This time, though, and without needing to be told much, Hong Kong residents took matters into their own hands. The city’s financial district was reduced to a ghost town in early February as companies closed offices. Bakeries known for hour-long weekend lines were abandoned.

Parties, weddings and family gatherings were canceled — without any government order. Almost everyone rushed to ­procure masks; a recent study ­estimated that 74 percent to 98 percent of residents wore them when leaving their homes. Voluntary social distancing was hailed as a key reason for the lower rate of infections.

From electronic wristbands to smartphone trackers, Asian jurisdictions have pulled out all the stops to ensure that suspected patients comply with quarantine and isolation orders, monitoring that is backed by laws that were tightened post-SARS.

Singapore used its FBI equivalent, the Criminal Investigation Department, to effectively interrogate every confirmed case with stunning granularity — even using patients’ digital wallets to trace their footsteps. Those caught lying face fines and jail time.

In South Korea, information on the movements of infected people before they were tested is collected and relayed over smartphones, creating a real-time ma

Taiwan tracks infected people’s whereabouts via smartphones

In Hong Kong, everyone subject to a compulsory quarantine must activate real-time location-sharing on their phone or wear an electronic wristband.

These measures have been backed by local populations that lived through previous epidemics and have largely shed concerns about privacy and tracking.

Americans should not focus “only on the kind of high-profile displays of state power that have made headlines from China” but also look at countries such as South Korea that are “balancing Democratic openness with rapid, concerted public-health action.”

Experts agree, though, that Western governments must be prepared to limit their citizens’ movements, mandate isolation for positive cases and track contacts regardless of privacy concerns.

Largely an office procedure when widespread screening was first recommended, colonoscopies have moved into surgery centers — which were created as a step down from costly hospital care but are now often a lucrative step up from doctors’ examining rooms — where they are billed like a quasi operation.

The high price paid for colonoscopies mostly results not from top-notch patient care, according to interviews with health care experts and economists, but from business plans seeking to maximize revenue; haggling between hospitals and insurers that have no relation to the actual costs of performing the procedure; and lobbying, marketing and turf battles among specialists that increase patient fees.

While several cheaper and less invasive tests to screen for colon cancer are recommended as equally effective by the federal government’s expert panel on preventive care — and are commonly used in other countries — colonoscopy has become the go-to procedure in the United States. “We’ve defaulted to by far the most expensive option, without much if any data to support it,”

Hospitals, drug companies, device makers, physicians and other providers can benefit by charging inflated prices, favoring the most costly treatment options and curbing competition that could give patients more, and cheaper, choices. And almost every interaction can be an opportunity to send multiple, often opaque bills with long lists of charges: $100 for the ice pack applied for 10 minutes after a physical therapy session, or $30,000 for the artificial joint implanted in surgery.

Even doctors often do not know the costs of the tests and procedures they prescribe. When Dr. Michael Collins, an internist in East Hartford, Conn., called the hospital that he is affiliated with to price lab tests and a colonoscopy, he could not get an answer. “It’s impossible for me to think about cost,” he said

The more than $35,000 annually that Ms. Yapalater and her employer collectively pay in premiums — her share is $15,000 — for her family’s Oxford Freedom Plan would be more than sufficient to cover their medical needs in most other countries. She and her husband, Jeff, 63, a sales and marketing consultant, have three children in their 20s with good jobs. Everyone in the family exercises, and none has had a serious illness.

A major factor behind the high costs is that the United States, unique among industrialized nations, does not generally regulate or intervene in medical pricing, aside from setting payment rates for Medicare and Medicaid, the government programs for older people and the poor. Many other countries deliver health care on a private fee-for-service basis, as does much of the American health care system, but they set rates as if health care were a public utility or negotiate fees with providers and insurers nationwide, for example.

“In the U.S., we like to consider health care a free market,” said Dr. David Blumenthal, president of the Commonwealth Fund and a former adviser to President Obama. ”But it is a very weird market, riddled with market failures.”

Consumers, the patients, do not see prices until after a service is provided, if they see them at all. And there is little quality data on hospitals and doctors to help determine good value, aside from surveys conducted by popular Web sites and magazines. Patients with insurance pay a tiny fraction of the bill, providing scant disincentive for spending.

The United States spends about 18 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, nearly twice as much as most other developed countries. The Congressional Budget Office has said that if medical costs continue to grow unabated, “total spending on health care would eventually account for all of the country’s economic output.”

Instead, payments are often determined in countless negotiations between a doctor, hospital or pharmacy, and an insurer, with the result often depending on their relative negotiating power. Insurers have limited incentive to bargain forcefully, since they can raise premiums to cover costs.

“People think it’s like other purchases: that if you pay more you get a better car. But in medicine, it’s not like that.”

Democracy’s throw-the-bums-out feedback mechanism gets gummed up when the electorate disagrees about the identity of the bums, what did and didn’t occur on their watch and who deserves what share of the credit or blame.

When party affiliation becomes a central source of meaning and self-definition, reality itself becomes contested and verifiable facts turn into hot-button controversies

Elections can’t render an authoritative verdict on the performance of incumbents when partisans in a closely divided electorate tell wildly inconsistent stories about one another and the world they share.

polarization hasn’t completely wrecked our democracy’s capacity for self-correction: Sweeping a medium-size city’s worth of dead Americans under the rug turned out to be too tall an order.

However, Mr. Trump’s relentless campaign to goose the economy by cutting taxes, running up enormous deficits and debt, and hectoring the Fed into not raising rates was working for millions of Americans. We tend to notice when we’re personally more prosperous than we were a few years before.

He succeeded in putting Democrats on the defensive about economic restrictions and school closures. As months passed and with no new relief coming from Washington, financially straitened Democratic states and cities had little choice but to ease restrictions on businesses just to keep the lights on

That seemed to concede the economic wisdom of the more permissive approach in majority-Republican states and fed into Mr. Trump’s false narrative of victory over the virus and a triumphant return to normalcy.

it was unforgivably cruel of Republicans to force blue-collar and service workers to risk death for grocery money. Yet their disinformation campaign persuaded many millions of Americans that the risk was minimal and that Democrats were keeping their workplaces and schools closed, their customers and kids at home, and their wallets empty and cupboards bare for bogus reasons

Democrats needed to present a competing, compelling strategy to counter Republican messaging. Struggling workers and businesses never clearly heard exactly what they’d get if Democrats ran the show, and Democrats never came together to scream bloody murder that Republicans were refusing to give it to them.

Democrats needed to underscore the depth of Republican failure by forcefully communicating what other countries had done to successfully control the virus. And they needed to promise to do the same through something like an Operation Warp Speed for testing and P.P.E. to get America safely back in business.

correctly assigning culpability did nothing to help working-class breadwinners who can’t bus tables, process chickens, sell smoothies or clean hotel rooms over Zoom.

The Republican message couldn’t have been clearer: Workers should be able to show up, clock in, earn a normal paycheck, pay the rent and feed their kids

Democrats were telling the same workers that we need to listen to science, reopening is premature, and the economy can’t be fully restored until we beat the virus. Correct! But how does that help when rent was due last week?

They allowed Republicans to define the contrast between the parties’ approaches to the pandemic in terms of freedom versus exhausting, indefinite shutdowns.

They need to accept that they took hits on the economy by failing to escape the trap Republicans set by doggedly refusing to do anything about the uncontained contagion destroying it.

And they need to understand how Mr. Trump saved his party by weaponizing polarization

Conservatives needed a way not to get spun by the president’s destabilizing act of disloyalty, so they steadied themselves by reaffirming their loyalty down the remainder of the ballot

Until the mind-bending spell of polarization breaks, everything that matters will be fiercely disputed and even the most egregious failures will continue to go unpunished.

This is yet another wake-up call illustrating the risks that new digital technologies can pose when they end up in the wrong hands, and for the development community.

It reminds those working on digital identity and digital public infrastructure for development, that the benefits of ID systems – enshrined in the sustainable development goal 16.9, right to legal identity – should never be at the expense of individual safety.

For example, we must embrace the “data minimisation principle” – the idea that only necessary personal data should be collected and retained. We also need an approach that minimises centralised data collection, and gives more control to individuals.

Countries such as Germany, Spain and the Netherlands are developing digital wallet-based ID systems – that decentralise data storage and control – while the EU’s Covid vaccine passport uses a similar model.

Aldi’s progression highlights the trend. Its first UK store in 1990 was in a working-class area of Birmingham. Now it has identified Oxford, Harrogate and Tunbridge Wells as its next targets, and claims to have attracted an extra 1.3 million shoppers over the past year, two thirds of whom are ABC1

my resistance has been twofold. First, I’ve wrongly valued being given a choice. I’ve wanted to choose between five different types of plain yoghurt

It’s a fallacy, of course. All that choice really provides is a greater opportunity for the marketeers to manipulate you. The supermarkets have been perfecting the art of upselling you for decades. You don’t stand a chance. The lack of choice on the discounters’ shelves is liberating and means you can get the shop done in a fraction of the time.

The other thing that has put me off the discounters is that the stores are a bit crap.