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Javier E

Why Trumpism Will Outlast Steve Bannon - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • At the start of the 2016 presidential campaign, supporting trade deals was considered a strongly held Republican view. The year before, 49 out of 54 Republican Senators had voted to give President Obama the “fast-track” authority necessary to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) through Congress. In 2014, Republicans had told the Pew Research Center that free-trade deals benefited the United States by a margin of 19 points. Trump changed that. By the fall of 2016, by a whopping 44-point margin, Republicans told Pew that trade deals harmed the United States.
  • if Trump has moved the GOP toward nationalism and nativism, why can’t he—or a future Republican leader—move it back? They could, but it won’t be easy because the Republican coalition has changed.
  • Between 1992 and 2016, the percentage of whites with college degrees that identified as Republicans dropped five points. Over that same period, the percentage of whites with a high-school degree or less who identified as Republicans rose 18 points.
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  • Blue-collar Republicans are far more hostile to immigration and free trade than their white-collar counterparts. And as Walter Russell Mead has famously observed, they tend to be “Jacksonian” on foreign policy. When they feel threatened, they support ferocious military attacks. But they have little appetite for expending blood or treasure on behalf of international norms or commitments from which they perceive little personal benefit.
  • these views are still underrepresented in Washington, where corporate interests and a hawkish foreign-policy class push the GOP toward internationalism. But over time, the shift among grassroots Republicans will reshape Washington institutions that rely on conservative eyeballs or small-donor donations.
  • Ten or even five years ago, The Weekly Standard was more influential than Breitbart. Now it’s the reverse. Listen to Fox News these days and you’ll hear little enthusiasm for the war in Afghanistan and a lot of enthusiasm for keeping Afghans out of the United States.
  • Over time, nationalist conservatives will even develop an intellectual class. In January, a former student of the influential conservative Harvard political theorist Harvey Mansfield created a journal called American Affairs to give Bannonism intellectual heft.
  • Jonathan Chait once wrote that in interpreting politics, it’s important to distinguish between the weather, which constantly fluctuates, and the climate, which defines the broad parameters within which those fluctuations occur.
rerobinson03

Did President Trump Keep His First-Term Promises? Let's Look at 5 of Them - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Has he kept the promises that helped get him here? And do his supporters care? A recent survey from New York University found that those who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 thought he had broken fewer than one promise out of five. Those who voted for Hillary Clinton said he broke more than four out of five.
  • In reality, Mr. Trump has broken about half of 100 campaign promises, according to a tracker by PolitiFact. T
  • Supporters of Mr. Trump who spoke to The New York Times said overwhelmingly that they were pleased with how he had lived up to his pledges. Here’s a look at how he fared on some of his signature promises.
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  • Over the past four years, the Trump administration had constructed 371 miles of border barriers, as of Oct 16. And it is on pace to reach 400 miles next week. However, all but 16 miles of the new barriers replace or reinforce existing structures.
  • Alan Sanchez, 57, a defense contractor from Maricopa, Ariz., conceded that the president did not get it done. But he said he did what he could.
  • The Department of Homeland Security has argued that the new barriers have reduced the personnel needed to staff certain sectors, and reduced unauthorized immigration. In Mr. Trump’s first year in office, illegal border crossings did decline to the lowest point since the 1970s, but then increased to the highest point in a decade in the 2019 fiscal year before decreasing again this year during the pandemic.
  • His campaign boasts that he has flipped the balance of three federal appeals courts and shifted nine appeals courts to the right. His nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the weeks before the election could reshape abortion rights, immigration law and the government’s regulatory power. Confirming a Supreme Court justice so close to an election was unprecedented, and Democrats framed it as an illegitimate power grab by Republicans.
  • The yearslong Republican campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act came to a head unsuccessfully and dramatically in the first year of Mr. Trump’s presidency, when Senator John McCain of Arizona cast the decisive vote against the effort.
  • The 2017 tax cuts are one of the biggest legislative achievements of Mr. Trump’s first term in office, and one celebrated by his supporters.
  • Some critics, however, have noted that the final tax cut that Mr. Trump signed into law was far smaller than what he promised as a candidate. The Tax Policy Center, run by the Brookings Institution, estimated that it was only one-quarter the size of the plan Mr. Trump campaigned on four years ago
  • Mr. Trump said he would cut the top corporate income tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent, for example. His final bill brought it down to 21 percent.Those nuances, however, have been left out of his rallies, where Mr. Trump has been telling his supporters (falsely) that he succeeded in passing the “biggest tax cut in history.”
  • While most Americans got a tax cut, high earners received 60 percent of the total tax savings.
  • He vowed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement or withdraw from it entirely, pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and raise tariffs.He has delivered on those promises.
  • Though some experts are skeptical that Mr. Trump’s trade policies have been economically beneficial — with the conservative Tax Foundation estimating that the tariffs have brought in revenue, but reduced wages, gross domestic product and job growth — supporters have been delighted.
leilamulveny

The old world isn't coming back, no matter who wins the US presidential election - CNN - 0 views

  • Even if Joe Biden wins the election, he can't quell the forces that spurred Trumpism
  • So why would adversaries like Iran do more deals when the US could just walk out again?
  • Americans don't want to get sucked into the world's problems anymore. There's no chance a big trade deal like the Obama-era Trans-Pacific Partnership — a potential counter to China that was dumped by President Donald Trump — could get through the US Congress. And America seems set into a long-term confrontation with Beijing whoever lives in the White House.
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  • The Democratic presidential nominee has signaled he would rejoin the Paris climate accord, seek to salvage the Iran nuclear deal, give dictators the cold shoulder, treat allies with respect instead of berating them and build a global coalition to counter China's rise. But while Air Force One is nice and all, a 78-year-old President might not be jetting around the world that much.
  • The European Union is beginning to envision a world not guaranteed by US power. And Russia will make mischief wherever it can.
  • A Biden presidency might offer more strategic stability and less disruption -- and a steadier hand on the nuclear trigger. But don't expect dominant global leadership in a splintering world.
carolinehayter

He Killed a Transgender Woman in the Philippines. Why Was He Freed? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • And she died shortly after 11 p.m. on Oct. 11, 2014, in a motel room in Olongapo, a port city about 100 miles north and west of Manila in the Philippines, at the hands of an American she had met earlier that evening at a nightclub, a Marine who was in the country for joint military exercises.
  • After discovering that Laude was transgender, Lance Cpl. Joseph Scott Pemberton, who was 19 at the time, choked her and pushed her head into a toilet bowl until she drowned. Then he took a taxi across town to Subic Bay, where his ship was docked, and, according to a shipmate who later testified in court, admitted what he had just done.
  • found guilty of homicide, a charge downgraded by the judge from murder, and was sentenced by the Olongapo Regional Trial Court to six to 12 years in prison, which was later reduced to a 10-year maximum on appeal.
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  • It marked a major victory in the eyes of human rights advocates in the country who have been fighting to hold American service members accountable for violence against Filipina women — which they see as a byproduct of the U.S. military’s 120-year presence
  • With the Pemberton conviction, it seemed that justice was finally moving in the right direction.
  • But on Sept. 13, Pemberton was put aboard a U.S. military cargo plane and flown out of the Philippines, a free man. A week earlier, President Rodrigo Duterte made the bombshell announcement that he had granted Pemberton an absolute pardon, nullifying the Marine’s sentence after less than six years served.
  • After the guilty verdict was announced, the judge ordered Pemberton to start serving his sentence at New Bilibid Prison, the largest detention facility in the Philippines, where more than 26,000 convicted men sleep in crowded cell blocks, disease festers and temperatures can reach over 100 degrees in the summer. But that detention order was revised just hours later
  • the presidential pardon came just hours after Duterte’s own administration filed a motion to block a court order that would have freed the Marine on other grounds.
  • the recent developments have seen the case deteriorate into an apparent tool for political leverage rather than justice
  • “This should give us a lesson that the U.S. has no respect for our sovereignty,” Virginia Lacsa Suarez, the attorney for the Laude family, told The New York Times in response to the court order to release Pemberton that was issued even before the pardon. “It shows that the U.S. looks down on us, that the U.S. does not even respect our laws.
  • From the beginning, the United States maintained an influence over the Pemberton case, despite the Philippines’ jurisdiction over crimes committed by U.S. service members. In 2014, Pemberton was first questioned by the United States Naval Criminal Investigative Service instead of Philippine police, and he was initially held onboard his ship, the U.S.S. Peleliu, anchored in Subic Bay, and then under U.S. guard at a Philippine military base, instead of in a Philippine jail. After he was arrested, the Marine Corps hired an attorney to represent him and paid all his legal fees, which had exceeded $550,000 by this fall
  • The pardon is the final chapter of a polarizing, high-profile case that has cost the U.S. Marine Corps more than half a million dollars and provoked debate over decades-old defense treaties between the two countries.
  • The agreement grants the United States considerable privileges toward determining where convicted American personnel will be detained, and Pemberton remained in a private air-conditioned cell fashioned from a shipping container at Camp Aguinaldo, a Philippine military base where he was monitored by two guards from the Philippine Bureau of Corrections and a steady rotation of U.S. service members. Pemberton’s rank remained unchanged and he continued receiving his monthly salary of about $2,300, totaling more than $160,000 since the killing.
  • brought back bitter memories for Filipinos of another case in which a U.S. Marine was accused of rape. In 2006, Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith received a 40-year prison sentence for raping Suzette Nicolas
  • Smith was held briefly in a Philippine jail, but after the United States canceled a joint military exercise in the Philippines, he was handed over to the U.S. Embassy. Smith remained at the embassy for more than two years, until Nicolas unexpectedly recanted her accusation and Smith was acquitted and returned home.
  • “In both cases, there are many forces trying to undermine the testimonies of the victims, or the witnesses or their families,
  • From the get-go, it was fishy,
  • Garcia-Flores had submitted a motion under the Philippines’ Good Conduct Time Allowance law, and Judge Roline Ginez-Jabalde, the same official who convicted Pemberton in 2015, ruled that the Marine was free to go, on the grounds that he had already served almost six years and had earned four years off his sentence for good behavior while in custody.
  • “A crime happened, and Pemberton paid for it under the Philippine law without any special privileges,” Garcia-Flores says. “If people think that he’s being given some special treatment, they are wrong.”
  • Suarez immediately moved to oppose Pemberton’s release, and so did the Department of Justice, arguing that only the Bureau of Corrections, not the Philippine courts, had the authority to determine whether Pemberton deserved time off his sentence for good conduct
  • Duterte met with Secretary of Justice Menardo Guevarra to discuss his constitutional right to grant an absolute pardon. At 4:51 p.m. the same day, Duterte’s secretary of foreign affairs, Teodoro Locsin Jr., announced the pardon in a tweet. “If there is a time when you are called upon to be fair, be fair,” Dutuerte said later in a televised address.
  • The news drew protests as the president’s critics took to social media and the streets, organizing demonstrations in Manila to voice their anger at Duterte’s decision. Many members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community thought the president was sending a signal that the Philippine government doesn’t believe that the lives of transgender women are important.
  • Beyond the question of whether the pardon was an anti-trans reaction by Duterte, it may have also been a strategic move to gain an advantage in relations with the United States
  • In February, Duterte gave notice that he was terminating the Visiting Forces Agreement, a move that many interpreted as a response to the U.S. State Department revoking the visa of Senator Ronald dela Rosa, the former National Police chief widely regarded as the architect of the administration’s notoriously violent war on drugs. Then in June, Duterte confirmed that he wouldn’t be canceling the agreement for at least another six months, and in July, dela Rosa announced that the United States would be reinstating his visa.
  • Despite Duterte’s outwardly critical stance toward the United States, relations between the two countries remain strong.
  • It’s the latest in more than $1.5 billion in arms that Duterte’s administration has moved to purchase from the United States this year, despite calls from Human Rights Watch for Congress to block the sales, citing the Philippine armed forces’ lengthy history of military and human rights abuses
  • Duterte was always likely to take a pragmatic approach to Pemberton’s release. “He’s willing to engage with us, but it’s not his first preference in most situations,” Schaus says. “But when an opportunity presents itself to advance his priorities in a way that is palatable to him, he’s willing to entertain it
  • necessary precautions in countries where the United States wants to maintain a strategic presence — including the Philippines, a key player in responding to China’s rising power in the western Pacific.
  • The Visiting Forces Agreement ensures that the two countries have a predetermined process to be followed if a service member is arrested and charged with a crime, when tensions are likely to be high.
  • Upon leaving the Philippines on Sunday, Pemberton was brought to Camp Smith in Hawaii. “The Marine Corps is taking appropriate administrative action,” Perrine said. He was unable to indicate whether Pemberton will be demoted, or if he will be given a less-than-honorable discharge.
Javier E

Opinion | The End of the New World Order - The New York Times - 0 views

  • the coronavirus is inspiring a surge of N.W.O. paranoia, a renewed fear of elite cabals that aspire to rule the world. But at the same time, the actual new world order, the dream of global integration and transnational governance, is disintegrating before our very eyes.
  • The phrase “New World Order” was lifted by the conspiracy-minded from the optimistic rhetoric of George H.W. Bush
  • The fantasy is looming totalitarian control, black helicopters descending, secret Bilderberg plots. But it’s been encouraged by various undeniable realities — the growth of transnational institutions, the manifest power of a global overclass, the often undemocratic expansion of the European Union and the rise of digital surveillance and the ties binding China and the U.S. into “Chimerica.”
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  • Now it’s being given new life by the response to the coronavirus, which is being cast as a pretext for some sort of one-worlder takeover — with Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci held up as potential masterminds, “test and trace” as a scheme for permanent surveillance.
  • Instead of leading to some sort of globalist consolidation, the rule of the coronavirus is unraveling internationalism everywhere you look.
  • The virus has exposed global entities as either weak and politically compromised, in the case of the World Health Organization, or all-but-irrelevant, in the case of the United Nations
  • It has restored or hardened borders, impeded migration, devolved power from the international to national and the national to local
  • And it has spurred renewed great power rivalry, with “Chimerica” dissolving and a trans-Pacific Cold War looming.
  • Yes, some forms of test-and-trace may increase tech-industry surveillance power. But in every other respect, the trends and institutions that provoke new world order paranoia are likely to emerge from this crisis battered, discredited or permanently weakened.
  • The same counterpoint applies to the narrower, less apocalyptic suggestion that the pandemic lockdowns are an expression of late-stage liberal cosmopolitanism, of the liberal technocrat’s obsession with physical health and state control
  • In reality, late-stage liberalism is obsessed with health and state supervision for the purposes of personal liberation, pleasure-seeking, tourism and commerce. So a period of lockdown and closed borders is not the apotheosis of liberal cosmopolitanism, but its temporary negation
Javier E

Opinion | Bidenomics: The Queen Bee Is Jennifer Harris - The New York Times - 0 views

  • I was thrilled when the Biden administration came in with a plan for big federal investments in the American industrial base, tariffs, support for labor unions and actions against monopolies. No one knew what to call it — Post-neoliberalism? Democratic capitalism? Neopopulism? — but for the first time in generations a U.S. administration was saying that people should control the market, not the other way around.
  • But if it was the right path, why didn’t more voters trust President Biden on the economy?
  • To understand who Ms. Harris is, you have to know who she used to be.
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  • As a young State Department policy planner in the 2000s, she was a lonely voice in Washington raising the alarm about the rise of China. She pushed for tariffs and against trade agreements before it was cool, and was an author of a book called “War by Other Means” about how blind faith in free markets put the United States at a geopolitical disadvantage. For years, she felt like an oddball in Washington, where both parties were still in thrall to neoliberalism.
  • The Hewlett Foundation hired her as the head of an initiative that has given away $140 million so far to people who are devising a new economic philosophy. Then she served a stint in the White House. Today, she’s an intellectual leader of a growing, bipartisan consensus
  • She fell in love with economics and studied it at Wake Forest. After she joined a student delegation to a NATO summit in Prague in 2002, a faculty adviser on that trip offered her a job in Washington working at the National Intelligence Council. In those early years, she believed what everyone else in Washington believed about the economy — that governments ought not meddle with it.
  • if Mr. Trump correctly identified a problem — “China is eating our lunch” — he did not solve it, beyond putting tariffs on Chinese products. His tax cut for the rich hurt rather than helped matters.
  • It’s the Biden administration that came in with a plan to build an economy that was good for workers, not just shareholders, using some strategies Ms. Harris had been talking about for years.
  • The thinking behind it goes like this: Unquestioning belief in the free market created a globalism that funneled money to the 1 percent, which has used its wealth to amass political power at the expense of everyone else. It produced free trade agreements that sent too many U.S. factories to China and rescue plans after the 2008 financial crisis that bailed out Wall Street instead of Main Street.
  • It was her job to track China’s use of subsidies, industrial espionage and currency manipulation to fuel its rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. Ms. Harris argued that tariffs on China were a necessary defense. Nobody agreed. “I was kind of just banging my head against this wall,” she told me. “The wall was a foreign policy establishment that saw markets as sacrosanct.”
  • Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to renegotiate NAFTA, but he struck up a new trade deal instead — the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Ms. Harris argued against it. “We didn’t have the foggiest idea” of what it would do to our economy, she told me. Nobody listened.
  • it sent Democrats back to the intellectual drawing board. Larry Kramer, then the president of the Hewlett Foundation, recruited her in 2018 to promote alternatives to ideas that had guided U.S. policy for decades. He hoped she could do for free-market skepticism what Milton Friedman and his allies had done for free-market fundamentalism, which became policy under the Reagan administration and eventually was embraced by both parties as truth.
  • She has since rejoined the Hewlett Foundation, where she funds people who are proposing new solutions to economic problems. One grantee, the conservative think tank American Compass, promotes the idea of a domestic development bank to fund infrastructure — an idea with bipartisan appeal.
  • But the work that Ms. Harris and others in the Biden administration have done is unfinished, and poorly understood. The terms “Bidenomics” and “Build Back Better” don’t seem to resonate
  • Ms. Harris acknowledges that these ideas haven’t yet taken hold in the broader electorate, and that high interest rates overshadow the progress that’s been made. It’s too early for voters to feel it, she told me: “The investments Biden has pushed through aren’t going to be felt in a month, a year, two years.”
  • she celebrates the fact that leaders across the political spectrum are embracing the idea that Americans need to “get back to building things in this country.” This election has no candidates blindly promoting the free market. The last one didn’t either. In the battle of ideas, she has already won.
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