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zachcutler

The manufacturing boom that Donald Trump ignores - Oct. 20, 2016 - 0 views

  • The manufacturing boom that Donald Trump ignores
  • "Made in the U.S.A." is not dead. The nation's manufacturing sector is actually booming, even if many people don't realize it.
  • "We produce more today than we ever have," said Chad Moutray, chief economist with the National Association of Manufacturers. "We made $2.1 trillion worth of products in 2015. There are sectors doing really well."
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  • While some of the lost factory jobs are due to outsourcing to foreign plants, others have been lost to automation and improved efficiency.
  • U.S. aircraft production is at a record high and well ahead of the rest of the world.
  • U.S. auto production and employment has also been growing steadily since bottoming out in 2009 with the bankruptcies at GM and Chrysler.
  • The chemical boom has been fueled by the record U.S. energy boom, which has made oil and natural gas particularly cheap. Petroleum is a key raw material for many chemicals, most of which are produced using energy from natural gas.
Javier E

Phony Oppositions and Score Settling - 0 views

  • I believe there is a good likelihood, probably even a probability, that if the Russian subversion campaign had never happened and James Comey had never released his letter, Hillary Clinton would be prepping to become our new President. My own guess is that Comey's letter had the bigger impact. These were both profoundly damaging events in the race and Clinton lost by very tight margins in most of the newly (hopefully temporarily) red states. I see little way to challenge this assertion.
  • But the tiny margins are only one side of the story. Let's take Wisconsin. The final tally puts Trump ahead by .8%, or 22,748 votes. That's a tiny margin. Any number of things could have shifted the balance. Spending the final week of the campaign talking about a new investigation of Clinton's emails was more than enough to tip the balance. Spending not just a single trip but more concerted time in the state could have too.
  • But now look at the shift from 2012. The shift in the direction of the GOP was 7.7%. That is a huge shift over four years. Huge. There's no getting around that. If you step back from Wisconsin to the larger Upper Midwest region and indeed the United States you see something more fundamental. Donald Trump did what we all remember Barack Obama doing in 2008: He changed the shape of the electorate.
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  • What all of this comes down to is that something very big happened in this election that was quite separate from Comey and Putin
  • If you believe in the integrity of our elections, American sovereignty and - yes, let's say it - the importance of the legitimacy of the Trump presidency, the Russian sabotage and influence campaign is hugely important. But if you can't distinguish between let's say the 1 or 2 percentage point shift caused by Russia and Comey, from the 5 or 6 or 7 percentage point shift that made that small shift so consequential, I really don't know how to help you. They're both extremely important, but for very different reasons.
  • My own sense is that this is mainly internecine score settling.
  • The truth is it shouldn't have been close enough for these outside interventions to have allowed Trump to win. But it was.
  • Was that because Clinton was a terrible candidate and Sanders should have been the nominee? Maybe. But I doubt it. At a minimum I don't think it is so clear as to be treated as a given
  • While I believe Democrats have many good economic policies, I don't believe they have an adequate and overarching theory of the problem of wage stagnation or ever-increasing economic insecurity (a interlocked series of economic and political problems) or a set of policies and a politics to address it. That doesn't mean they're ignoring it. That doesn't mean anyone else has a better set. But what Democrats have is not enough
  • Holding the presidency for eight years combined with a still accurate belief that their constituencies are growing while the other party's is shrinking has led to a deep deficit of political organizing in all fifty states. Democrats had this as recently as a decade ago. But it atrophied. As much as anything there is a revolt against the increasingly urban and non-white America symbolized by the 'Obama coalition', one that combines racial backlash, economic decline and cultural marginalization. There is something there that goes far beyond anything that can be addressed by a more class based politics alone.
  • My point here isn't to offer that critique or to pose a solution. My aim here is simply to highlight that fact that multiple things produced the November 8th result. Some are enduring and will be there in 2018 and 2020. Some are contingent events that will likely never happen again or at least not in any predictable way. They all happened. They're all important. They get addressed, dealt with in different ways. But standing them up against each other, shouting one down in favor of the other has far more to do with the self-destructive score settling which the bitterness of defeat brings in its wake than anything that is productive of building a different, better future.
  • I don't have any unified theory of the problem. I also see no point in exaggerating the problems. But I can also see a list of 4 or 5 things that need working on right now. Getting to work on those seems more important than any grand unified theory.
katyshannon

U.S. Strikes in Somalia Kill 150 Shabab Fighters - The New York Times - 0 views

  • American aircraft on Saturday struck a training camp in Somalia belonging to the Islamist militant group the Shabab, the Pentagon said, killing about 150 fighters who were assembled for what American officials believe was a graduation ceremony and prelude to an imminent attack against American troops and their allies in East Africa.
  • Defense officials said the strike was carried out by drones and American aircraft, which dropped a number of precision-guided bombs and missiles on the field where the fighters were gathered.
  • Pentagon officials said they did not believe there were any civilian casualties, but there was no independent way to verify the claim. They said they delayed announcing the strike until they could assess the outcome
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  • It was the deadliest attack on the Shabab in the more than decade-long American campaign against the group, an affiliate of Al Qaeda, and a sharp deviation from previous American strikes, which have concentrated on the group’s leaders, not on its foot soldiers. Continue reading the main story #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap { max-width:180px; } .g-artboard { margin:0 auto; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180{ position:relative; overflow:hidden; width:180px; } .g-aiAbs{ position:absolute; } .g-aiImg{ display:block; width:100% !important; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 p{ font-family:nyt-franklin,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:13px; line-height:18px; margin:0; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 .g-aiPstyle0 { font-size:11px; line-height:13px; font-weight:500; font-style:italic; color:#628cb2; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 .g-aiPstyle1 { font-size:12px; line-height:14px; font-weight:500; letter-spacing:0.00833333333333em; color:#000000; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 .g-aiPstyle2 { font-size:12px; line-height:14px; font-weight:500; text-align:right; letter-spacing:0.00833333333333em; color:#000000; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 .g-aiPstyle3 { font-size:12px; line-height:13px; font-weight:700; letter-spacing:0.00833333333333em; color:#000000; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 .g-aiPstyle4 { font-size:11px; line-height:13px; font-weight:500; letter-spacing:0.00833333333333em; color:#000000; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 .g-aiPstyle5 { font-size:11px; line-height:13px; font-weight:500; font-style:italic; text-align:center; color:#628cb2; } #g-0308-for-web-ATTACKmap-180 .g-aiPstyle6 { font-size:9px; line-height:8px; font-weight:500; text-transform:uppercase; text-align:center; color:#000000; } Gulf of Aden ETHIOPIA SOMALIA Camp Raso Mogadishu KENYA Indian Ocean 300 miles MARCH 7, 2016 By The New York Times
  • It comes in response to new concerns that the group, which was responsible for one of the deadliest terrorist attacks on African soil when it struck a popular mall in Nairobi in 2013, is in the midst of a resurgence after losing much of the territory it once held and many of its fighters in the last several years.
  • The planned attack on American and African Union troops in Somalia, American officials say, may have been an attempt by the Shabab to carry out the same kind of high-impact act of terrorism as the one in Nairobi.
  • Pentagon officials would not say how they knew that the Shabab fighters killed on Saturday were training for an attack on United States and African Union forces, but the militant group is believed to be under heavy American surveillance.
  • The Shabab fighters were standing in formation at a facility the Pentagon called Camp Raso, 120 miles north of Mogadishu, when the American warplanes struck on Saturday, officials said, acting on information gleaned from intelligence sources in the area and from American spy planes
  • One intelligence agency assessed that the toll might have been higher had the strike happened earlier in the ceremony. Apparently, some fighters were filtering away from the event when the bombing began.
  • The strike was another escalation in what has become the latest battleground in the Obama administration’s war against terror: Africa.
  • The United States and its allies are focused on combating the spread of the Islamic State in Libya, and American officials estimate that with an influx of men from Iraq, Syria and Tunisia, the Islamic State’s forces in Libya have swelled to as many as 6,500 fighters, allowing the group to capture a 150-mile stretch of coastline over the past year.
  • The arrival of the Islamic State in Libya has sparked fears that the group’s reach could spread to other North African countries, and the United States is increasingly trying to prevent that
  • American forces are now helping to combat Al Qaeda in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso; Boko Haram in Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad; and the Shabab in Somalia and Kenya, in what has become a multifront war against militant Islam in Africa.
  • The United States has a small number of trainers and advisers with African Union — primarily Kenyan — troops in Somalia. Defense officials said that the African Union’s military mission to Somalia was believed to have been the target of the planned attack.
  • Saturday’s strike was the most significant American attack on the Shabab since September 2014, when an American drone strike killed the leader of the group, Ahmed Abdi Godane, at the time one of the most wanted men in Africa. That strike was followed by one last March, when Adan Garar, a senior member of the group, was killed in a drone strike on his vehicle.
  • If the killings of Mr. Godane and Mr. Garar initially crippled the group, that no longer appears to be the case. In the past two months, Shabab militants have claimed responsibility for attacks that have killed more than 150 people, including Kenyan soldiers stationed at a remote desert outpost and beachcombers in Mogadishu.
  • In addition, the group has said it was responsible for a bomb on a Somali jetliner that tore a hole through the fuselage and for an attack last month on a popular hotel and a public garden in Mogadishu that killed 10 people and injured more than 25. On Monday, the Shabab claimed responsibility for a bomb planted in a laptop computer that went off at an airport security checkpoint in the town of Beletwein in central Somalia, wounding at least six people, including two police officers. The police said that one other bomb was defused.
  • At the same time, Shabab assassination teams have fanned out across Mogadishu and other major towns, stealthily eliminating government officials and others they consider apostates.
  • The Shabab have also retaken several towns after African Union forces pulled out. The African Union peacekeeping force, paid for mostly by Western governments, features troops from Uganda, Burundi, Kenya, Djibouti and other African nations.
  • The Shabab were once strong, then greatly weakened and now seem to be somewhere in between, while analysts say the group competes with the Islamic State for recruits and tries to show — in the deadliest way — that it is still relevant. Its dream is to turn Somalia into a pure Islamic state.
katyshannon

E.P.A. Broke Law With Social Media Push for Water Rule, Auditor Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

  • WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded. From Our Advertisers .story-link { position: relative; display: block; text-decoration: none; padding: 6px 0; min-height: 65px; min-width: 300px; } .story-link:hover { background-color: #eeeeec; } .story-kicker, .story-heading, .summary { margin: 0; padding: 0; } .thumb { position: absolute; left: 0; top: 6px; } .thumb-hover, .story-link:hover .thumb-main { display: none } .thumb-main, .story-link:hover .thumb-hover { display: block } .story-body { padding-left: 75px; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: #000; } .story-body .story-kicker { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 11px; line-height: 11px; font-weight: 400; color: #5caaf3; } .story-heading { font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 700; padding: 5px 0 0; } Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation Changing Charity Younger donors are finding new ways to give. <noscript class=&quot;MOAT-nytdfp348531439194?moatClientLevel1=31074278&amp;amp;moatClientLevel2=343740158&amp;amp;moatClientLevel3=58584518&amp;amp;moatClientLevel4=94015704638&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer1=28390358&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer2=30706478&amp;amp;zMoatPR=n
  • The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report on the agency’s practices in The New York Times, drew a bright line for federal agencies experimenting with social media about the perils of going too far to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.
  • An E.P.A. official on Tuesday disputed the finding. “We use social media tools just like all organizations to stay connected and inform people across the country about our activities,” Liz Purchia, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement. “At no point did the E.P.A. encourage the public to contact Congress or any state legislature.”
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  • But the legal opinion emerged just as Republican leaders moved to block the so-called Waters of the United States clean-water rule through an amendment to the enormous spending bill expected to pass in Congress this week. While the G.A.O.’s findings are unlikely to lead to civil or criminal penalties, they do offer Republicans a cudgel for this week’s showdown.
  • The E.P.A. rolled out a social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even on more innovative tools such as Thunderclap, to counter opposition to its water rule, which effectively restricts how land near certain surface waters can be used. The agency said the rule would prevent pollution in drinking water sources. Farmers, business groups and Republicans have called the rule a flagrant case of government overreach.
  • The publicity campaign was part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to counter critics of its policies through social media tools, communicating directly with Americans and bypassing traditional news organizations.
  • At the White House, top aides to President Obama have formed the Office of Digital Strategy, which promotes his agenda on Twitter, Facebook, Medium and other social sites. Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser to the president, is charged in part with expanding Mr. Obama’s presence in that online world.
  • White House officials declined to say if they think Mr. Reynolds or other agency officials did anything wrong.
  • Federal agencies are allowed to promote their own policies, but are not allowed to engage in propaganda, defined as covert activity intended to influence the American public. They also are not allowed to use federal resources to conduct so-called grass-roots lobbying — urging the American public to contact Congress to take a certain kind of action on pending legislation.
  • As it promoted the Waters of the United States rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, the E.P.A. violated both of those prohibitions, a 26-page legal opinion signed by Susan A. Poling, the general counsel to the G.A.O., concluded in an investigation requested by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
malonema1

James Fallows on the Reinvention of America - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • After a several-year immersion in parts of the country that make the news mainly after a natural disaster or a shooting, or for follow-up stories on how the Donald Trump voters of 2016 now feel about Trump, I have a journalistic impulse similar to the one that dominated my years of living in China. That is the desire to tell people how much more is going on, in places they had barely thought about or even heard of, than they might have imagined.
  • At the time Deb and I were traveling, sociologists like Robert Putnam were documenting rips in the social fabric. We went to places where family stories matched the famous recent study by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton, showing rising mortality among middle-aged whites without a college degree for reasons that include chronic disease, addiction, and suicide. In some of the same cities where we interviewed forward-moving students, civic leaders, and entrepreneurs, the photographer Chris Arnade was portraying people the economy and society had entirely left behind. The cities we visited faced ethnic and racial tensions, and were struggling to protect local businesses against chain stores and to keep their most promising young people from moving away. The great majority of the states and counties we spent time in ended up voting for Donald Trump.
  • Serious as the era’s problems are, more people, in more places, told us they felt hopeful about their ability to move circumstances the right way than you would ever guess from national news coverage of most political discourse. Pollsters have reported this disparity for a long time. For instance, a national poll that The Atlantic commissioned with the Aspen Institute at the start of the 2016 primaries found that only 36 percent of Americans thought the country as a whole was headed in the right direction. But in the same poll, two-thirds of Americans said they were satisfied with their own financial situation, and 85 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with their general position in life and their ability to pursue the American dream. Other polls in the past half-dozen years have found that most Americans believe the country to be on the wrong course—but that their own communities are improving.
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  • I make no pretense that our proposed answers to those questions are precise or scientific. We traveled as broadly as we could. We listened; we learned. We were looking for civic success stories, and we found them. But we also ended up in places where well-intentioned efforts had failed. So we steadily adjusted our conclusions. We ended up convinced that the national prospect is more promising than we’d felt before we started—full of possibilities that the bleak trench warfare of national politics inevitably obscures.
  • America is becoming more like itself again. More Americans are trying to make it so, in more places, than most Americans are aware. Even as the country is becoming worse in obvious ways—angrier, more divided, less able to do the basic business of governing itself—it is becoming distinctly better on a range of other indicators that are harder to perceive. The pattern these efforts create also remains hidden. Americans don’t realize how fast the country is moving toward becoming a better version of itself.
  • During the Pennsylvania part of Romney’s tour, which then went on to Ohio, we stayed in a cheap motel in the hard-luck coal-country town of Hazleton, where the median household income, in the low $30,000s, was much less than the national level of more than $50,000 and the unemployment rate, about 15 percent at the time, was much greater. The few visible signs of after-dark life were bodegas on downtown Wyoming Street, serving the city’s growing Latino population. When we got back from dinner at a small Mexican restaurant, we channel surfed to a local-access TV station and saw Lou Barletta, the longtime Republican mayor of Hazleton who had recently made it into Congress as part of the 2010 Tea Party wave, warn that ongoing immigration was a threat to Hazleton’s safety and quality of life. As mayor, Barletta had been a proto-Trump, championing a city ordinance that, among other anti-immigrant provisions, declared English the “official language” of Hazleton and required that official city business be conducted in English only. The measures were eventually tossed by federal courts.
  • Were we mistaking anecdotes and episodes for provable trends? This is the occupational hazard of journalism, and everyone in the business struggles toward the right balance of observation and data. But the logic of reporting is that something additional comes from traveling, asking, listening, seeing. This is particularly true in detecting a sense of changed course. A political movement, a new technological or business possibility—I have learned through the decades that enthusiasm in any of these realms does not guarantee world-changing success, but it’s an important marker. (The visionary California entrepreneurs I wrote about in the 1980s were confident that their Osborne and Kaypro computers would change the world. They were wrong. The visionary California entrepreneurs I met at Apple in those same years were confident that their dreams would come true. They were right.) And enthusiasm is what we have seen.
  • “Across the country, we’re seeing significant growth in local officials’ training for civic engagement, and the appearance of many new online platforms and other tools to connect citizens and their governments,” Pete Peterson, the dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, in California, told me. Peterson ran down a list of cities illustrating the effects of a new emphasis on engagement—starting, to my surprise, with the Los Angeles–area city of Bell. In 2010, Bell was the object of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times showing corruption in the city’s administration top to bottom. (For instance, the city manager of this small, low-income city had engineered pay for himself of well over $1 million a year.) The series was followed by arrests, trials, and prison sentences. “That city has seen nothing less than a civic renaissance, with new leadership and a public much more involved in the future of the city,” Peterson said. “It’s an amazing before-and-after illustration of what happens when people get engaged”—for example, involving citizens in decisions about what had been a notably secretive city-budgeting process.
  • In Wichita, Kansas; in Bend, Oregon; in Duluth, Minnesota; in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; in Fresno, we found people who had already worked in the most expensive and “elite” cities or who had been recruited for opportunities there, and decided instead that the overall life balance was better someplace smaller and less expensive. Steve Case, a co-founder of AOL and now the CEO of the technology-investment firm Revolution, has for several years led “Rise of the Rest” tours across the country to promote new tech businesses and support existing ones in places other than the famous tech centers. “For half a century, there’s been a brain drain, as people who grew up in the ‘rest of America’ left their hometowns for better opportunities elsewhere,” Case told me recently. Case himself grew up in Hawaii but built his companies in the Washington, D.C., area. “We’re starting to see less of that brain drain. We’re seeing more graduates stay in place, in cities like Pittsburgh or Columbus, and a boomerang of people returning to where they’re from—for lifestyle reasons, and because they can see that their communities are rising and opportunities are increasing, and they’d like to be part of what’s going on.”
  • There is of course evidence that this has happened, in the form of the bigotry that has been unleashed since 2017. In the months after Donald Trump took office, we checked back with communities where we’d met immigrants and refugees. Some places had seen a nasty shift, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and police became newly aggressive and local racists felt empowered. A few months before the election, we interviewed Catholic nuns and secular volunteers in Garden City, Kansas, who were bringing surplus food and medical supplies to poor households, many of whose members were immigrants working in the area’s vast beef-packing complex. A few months after the election, a white-extremist hate group in Garden City was arrested while plotting to blow up an apartment building where African immigrants and refugees lived. In Dodge City, we met and wrote about a rising, respected young city-government official named Ernestor de la Rosa. His parents had brought him to the U.S. from Mexico when he was a child, and he had stayed in the country as a “Dreamer,” on a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals waiver, while working toward an advanced degree at Wichita State. Trump carried Dodge City more than two to one. But people we spoke with there after the election said they never intended their preference in national politics to lead to the removal of trusted figures like de la Rosa.
katherineharron

Georgia's new law suppressing the vote is a victory for Trump - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.
  • The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy that raged through Trump's presidency and during the insurrection he incited against the US Capitol -- and now threatens to taint future elections as Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.
  • "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden said at the first news conference of his presidency that afternoon. The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.
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  • GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.
  • The Georgia bill is only one example of GOP efforts in multiple states -- including many crucial electoral battlegrounds -- to hold back a diverse demographic tide in cities that favor Democrats, which critics see as an attempt to cement minority rule in the United States.
  • Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sCNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css from creative 47804 */@-ms-keyframes bx-anim-1245919-spin { from {
  • "This should be marked as Exhibit A in making the case that discriminatory voter suppression is alive and well, and makes clear why we need federal voting rights legislation to stop these laws in their tracks," Hewitt said. "We stand ready to take action and protect the fundamental right to vote through the courts."
  • as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber. But Biden declined to reveal his strategy for getting the voting rights bill into law.
  • Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.
  • In a statement to CNN, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who defied Trump's pleas in a telephone call to find votes to overturn Biden's victory, said he would still stand up for voter freedoms but did not criticize the law."In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said
  • "As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
  • Black voters hampered by the restrictions of voting in urban areas have often found themselves lining up for hours to vote in inclement weather. The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.
  • Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.
  • Republican state lawmakers rushed through a broad law Thursday making it harder to vote that disproportionately targets Democratic and Black voters
  • The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy
  • The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.
  • "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden
  • Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.
  • Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.//assets.bounceexchang
  • After leaving office, Trump demanded that Republican state legislatures pass laws to ban mail-in voting and to prevent courts from weighing in on electoral disputes.
  • the former President has made the acceptance of his false conspiracy theories about voter fraud in 2020 a litmus test for Republican candidates
  • Iowa has already passed a measure to limit absentee balloting and voting hours. Texas is taking steps to cut voting hours and absentee balloting in big Democratic cities like Houston. New voting laws are being pushed by Republicans in another swing state Trump lost, Arizona.
  • GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.
  • voter mistrust was largely fueled by Trump's blatantly false claims
  • Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.
  • The drama in the Georgia Legislature unfolded as Biden condemned restrictive state legislation as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber.
  • The law allows any Georgian to make unlimited challenges to voter registrations, and, incredibly, makes it a misdemeanor crime for anyone to offer food and water to voters stuck in long lines to cast ballots.
  • The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.
  • The Georgia law was quickly signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who incurred the wrath of Trump last year for refusing to play along with his attempt to override Biden's victory by 12,000 votes in the state, which was confirmed by several audits.
  • "In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said.
  • Kemp is up for reelection in 2022 and could face Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former state lawmaker and prominent voting rights advocate
  • "As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
  • the measure directly targeted voters of color who took part in record numbers in the 2020 election.
  • The For the People Act awaiting action in the Senate would create automatic voter registration nationwide and restore portions of the Voting Rights Act that were gutted by the Supreme Court. It would also strengthen mail-in voting and permit early voting across the country, while taking steps to cut wait times at the polls.
Javier E

Free Black Thought: A Manifesto - Persuasion - 0 views

  • In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”
  • Growing out of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) movement, a culture of censorship has taken root in many of our institutions.
  • The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.
  • ...48 more annotations...
  • CRT makes two basic observations: First, that bias and prejudice exist not just in the hearts and minds of individuals, but also in society’s social structures and systems.
  • second, that bias embedded in systems is frequently invisible to the dominant class but perfectly perceptible to its victims
  • This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.
  • Both of these observations are true at least some of the time
  • The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.
  • In her book&nbsp;What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”
  • This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks
  • black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.
  • Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.
  • we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices
  • The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools
  • But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.
  • it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.
  • First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking
  • Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.
  • When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”
  • Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.
  • Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.
  • There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.
  • This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.
  • Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.
  • Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight
  • Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”
  • one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.
  • Third, marginalized communities are diverse.
  • To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.
  • “The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”
  • It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:
  • Today, Black people are no less&nbsp;diverse&nbsp;in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.
  • Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.
  • Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.
  • If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.
  • Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.
  • Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend
  • Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California
  • Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”
  • In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”
  • We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.
  • Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”
  • A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”
  • The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.
  • Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?
  • Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.
  • So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.
  • Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease
  • Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”
  • We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation
  • We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.
Javier E

Who Decides What's Racist? - Persuasion - 0 views

  • Growing out of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) movement, a culture of censorship has taken root in many of our institutions.
  • CRT makes two basic observations: First, that bias and prejudice exist not just in the hearts and minds of individuals, but also in society’s social structures and systems.
  • second, that bias embedded in systems is frequently invisible to the dominant class but perfectly perceptible to its victims
  • ...48 more annotations...
  • Both of these observations are true at least some of the time
  • The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.
  • In her book&nbsp;What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”
  • Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.
  • Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.
  • it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.
  • First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking
  • There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.
  • We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.
  • Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.
  • Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight
  • Third, marginalized communities are diverse.
  • “The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”
  • Today, Black people are no less&nbsp;diverse&nbsp;in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.
  • Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.
  • Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.
  • If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.
  • Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend
  • But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.
  • The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.
  • In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”
  • Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”
  • This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks
  • black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.
  • we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices
  • This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.
  • When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”
  • Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.
  • Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.
  • This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.
  • The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools
  • one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.
  • To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.
  • It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:
  • Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”
  • In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”
  • The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.
  • Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California
  • Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”
  • A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”
  • Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.
  • Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?
  • Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.
  • So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.
  • Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease
  • Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”
  • We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation
  • We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.
magnanma

Palace of Versailles: Facts & History | Live Science - 0 views

  • Located about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southwest of Paris, the palace is beside the settlement of Versailles. The town was little more than a hamlet before becoming the seat of royal power. By the time of the French Revolution, it had a population of more than 60,000 people, making it one of the largest urban centers in France.
  • France's kings were first attracted to Versailles because of the area's prolific game. Louis XIII, who lived 1601-1643, bought up land, built a chateau and went on hunting trips.
  • The chateau Louis XIII built was little more than a hunting lodge having enough space to house the king and a small entourage. It was his successor, Louis XIV (1638-1715), the "Sun King," a ruler who chose the sun as his emblem and believed in centralized government with the king at its center, who would radically transform Versailles making it the seat of France's government by the time of his death.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Spawforth notes that the palace contained about 350 living units varying in size, from multi-room apartments to spaces about the size of an alcove. The size and location of the room a person got depended on their rank and standing with the king. While the crown prince (known as the dauphin) got a sprawling apartment on the ground floor, a servant may have nothing more than a space in an attic or a makeshift room behind a staircase.
  • Scholars have suggested a number of factors that led him to build a great palace complex at Versailles and move the French government there. It's been noted that by keeping the king's residence some distance from Paris, it offered him protection from any civil unrest going on in the city. It also forced the nobles to travel to Versailles and seek lodging in the palace, something that impeded their ability to build up regional power bases that could potentially challenge the king.
  • A series of gardens, created in a formal style, stood to the west of the palace (one of them today is in the shape of a star) and contained sculptures as well as the pressurized fountains capable of launching water high into the air. The formality and grandeur of the gardens symbolized Louis XIV's absolute power, even over nature
  • Despite the richness of the palace, the kings had to make do with makeshift theaters up until 1768 when Louis XV allowed the building of the royal opera. It contained a mechanism that allowed the orchestra level to be raised to the stage allowing it to be used for dancing and banqueting. Spawforth notes that the opera required 3,000 candles to be burned for opening night and was rarely used due to its cost and the poor shape of France's finances.
  • After the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette would be stripped of power, brought to Paris and ultimately beheaded. The palace fell under the control of the new republican government.Many of its furnishings were sold to help pay for the subsequent Revolutionary Wars. When Napoleon came to power, he had an apartment created for himself in the Grand Trianon, complete with a map room.
  • In 1871, after France had lost a war against Prussia, Kaiser Wilhelm I was proclaimed Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors, adding an extra layer of humiliation to the French defeat. For several years after this defeat, the situation in France was so bad that its Chamber of Deputies and Senate opted to meet at Versailles, rather than Paris, for reasons of safety.
  • Today, Versailles is one of the most-visited sites in France. Visitors are drawn to its architectural grandeur, the stunning water features (concerts are often played in the gardens during the summer) and its sense of history.&nbsp;
B Mannke

BBC News - Chris Christie 'humiliated' by bridge-gridlock scandal - 0 views

  • 9 January 2014 Last updated at 14:25 ET Share this page Email Print Share this pageShareFacebookTwitter Chris Christie 'humiliated' by bridge-gridlock scandal Advertisement $render("advert-post-script-load"); New Jersey Governor Chris Christie: "I am responsible for what happened" Continue reading the main story Related Stories Twitter drips with Christie snark Chris Christie's bridge-sized headache Christie: Republicans' best hope New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has fired an aide who allegedly orchestrated traffic mayhem to pursue a petty political vendetta. Mr Christie, seen as a potential Republican White House candidate, apologised for the scandal, which he said "embarrassed and humiliated" him.
  • Mr Christie, seen as a potential Republican White House candidate, apologised for the scandal, which he said "embarrassed and humiliated" him. The gridlock was allegedly engineered to punish a Democratic mayor who did not endorse the governor's re-election. Mr Christie denied any involvement, blaming "deceitful" staff.
  • "I had no knowledge or involvement in this issue, in its planning or execution," he said, "and I am stunned by the abject stupidity that was shown here."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Asked about a 91-year-old woman who reportedly died after ambulance services were caught up in the gridlock, Mr Christie said that was "awful", though he added it was unclear whether the delay had contributed to her death.
  • "An apology today might be a bit premature. "I think this is a story that has not yet experienced its final chapter."
Javier E

The Rise of Anti-Capitalism - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The inherent dynamism of competitive markets is bringing costs so far down that many goods and services are becoming nearly free, abundant, and no longer subject to market forces.
  • in 1999 when Napster, the music service, developed a network enabling millions of people to share music without paying the producers and artists, wreaking havoc on the music industry. Similar phenomena went on to severely disrupt the newspaper and book publishing industries.
  • Cisco forecasts that by 2022, the private sector productivity gains wrought by the Internet of Things will exceed $14 trillion. A General Electric study estimates that productivity advances from the Internet of Things could affect half the global economy by 2025.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The Internet of Things is a game-changing platform that enables an emerging collaborative commons to flourish alongside the capitalist market.
  • A recent study revealed that approximately 50 percent of the aggregate revenue of the nonprofit sectors of 34 countries comes from fees, while government support accounts for 36 percent of the revenues and private philanthropy for 14 percent.
  • Millions of people are using social media sites, redistribution networks, rentals and cooperatives to share not only cars but also homes, clothes, tools, toys and other items at low or near zero marginal cost. The sharing economy had projected revenues of $3.5 billion in 2013.
  • In the United States, the number of nonprofit organizations grew by approximately 25 percent between 2001 and 2011, from 1.3 million to 1.6 million, compared with profit-making enterprises, which grew by a mere one-half of 1 percent. In the United States, Canada and Britain, employment in the nonprofit sector currently exceeds 10 percent of the work force.
  • This collaborative rather than capitalistic approach is about shared access rather than private ownership.
  • A formidable new technology infrastructure — the Internet of Things — is emerging with the potential to push much of economic life to near zero marginal cost over the course of the next two decades. This new technology platform is beginning to connect everything and everyone. Today more than 11 billion sensors are attached to natural resources, production lines, the electricity grid, logistics networks and recycling flows, and implanted in homes, offices, stores and vehicles, feeding big data into the Internet of Things.
julia rhodes

BBC News - Syria chemical weapons equipment destroyed, says OPCW - 0 views

  • 31 October 2013 Last updated at 19:42 ET Share this page Email Print Share this page2.6KShareFacebookTwitter Syria chemical weapons equipment destroyed, says OPCW Advertisement $render("advert-post-script-load"); Jerry Smith, OPCW: "We have... observed all of the destruction activities" Continue reading the main story Syria conflict Arms destruction Chemical stockpile 'Please let it be over' Assad opponents Syria's declared equipment for producing, mixing and filling chemical weapons has been destroyed, the international watchdog says. This comes a day before the deadline set by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The weapons have been placed under seal, an OPCW spokesman said. Inspectors were sent to Syria following allegations, denied by the government, that its forces had used chemical weapons in civilian areas. Continue reading the main story Analysis Jonathan Marcus BBC diplomatic correspondent The achievement of this crucial initial target is an important moment for the chemical weapons destruction effort in Syria. The inspectors' first task was to move swiftly to prevent the government from producing any more chemical agent and to destroy facilities and equipment used for mixing agents and filling munitions. Production facilities will be closely monitored to ensure that there are no moves to repair them. The next deadline is mid-November, by which time the OPCW and the Syrians must agree a detailed plan to destroy Syria's chemical weapons stockpile. All sorts of questions are raised. Where will this destruction be carried out ? Who will provide the necessary equipment and so on? Western intelligence agencies will be studying Syria's declarations carefully. They will be eager to direct inspectors to additional locations if there are any grounds to believe that Damascus has been less than frank in its disclosures. The inspections were agreed between Russia and the US after Washington threatened to use force in Syria. Syria's Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad
  • Syria's declared equipment for producing, mixing and filling chemical weapons has been destroyed, the international watchdog says.
  • nspectors were sent to Syria following allegations, denied by the government, that its forces had used chemical weapons in civilian areas.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • "I hope those who have always thought of us negatively will change their minds and understand that Syria was, is, and will be always a constructive partner," Mr Mekdad told our correspondent
  • Mr Countryman, the assistant secretary for international security and non-proliferation, told US lawmakers that "our target dates are ambitious but they are achievable".
  • In a separate development, a large explosion at a Syrian army base has been reported outside the coastal city of Latakia. A White House official told the BBC Israeli planes carried out the attack, saying he believed the intended target was Russian missiles. Separately, a US security official said Russian-made SA-125 missiles had been targeted, according to the Associated Press news agency.
  • Israel is believed to have targeted the same base in July and is concerned that some weapons in Syria are being moved to Hezbollah militants in neighbouring Lebanon.
  • Mr Smith said that verifying the destruction of Syria's weapons production capability had been a "particularly challenging job" because it had to be done in the midst of a conflict, with a tight deadline
  • The first step is for the weapons watchdog and the Syrian government to agree a timetable for the destruction of the chemical weapons stockpile - this should be done within the next two weeks
  • The US says more than 1,400 people were killed when government forces used a nerve agent to attack Ghouta on the outskirts of Damascus on 21 August. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian allies have said rebel groups were responsible
Javier E

The Coming Democratic Schism - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • According to Pew, the older group believes, 73-20, that “government should do more to solve problems.” Only 44 percent of the younger group agrees — and of younger respondents, 50 percent believe that “government is trying to do too much.”
  • Eighty-three percent of the older group of Democratic voters believes that “circumstances” are to blame for poverty; only 9 percent blame “a lack of effort.” The younger group of pro-Democratic voters is split, with 47 percent blaming circumstances and 42 percent blaming lack of effort.
  • An overwhelming majority of the older cohort, 83-12, believes that “government should do more to help needy Americans, even if it means more debt,” while a majority of the younger Democratic respondents, 56-39, believes “government cannot afford to do much more.”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • A 56 percent majority of the younger group of Democrats believes that “Wall Street helps the American economy more than it hurts,” with just 36 percent believing that Wall Street hurts the economy. Older Democrats have almost exactly the opposite view. 56 percent believe that Wall Street hurts the economy; 36 percent believe it helps.
  • Asked by Pew to choose between two statements — “Racial discrimination is the main reason why many blacks can’t get ahead” and “Blacks who can’t get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition” – the older Democratic cohort blamed discrimination, by an 80 to 10 margin. In contrast, only 19 percent of the younger group of Democrats blamed discrimination, with 68 percent saying that blacks “are mostly responsible for their own condition.”
  • Some 91 percent of the older group said the “U.S. needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights,” and just 6 percent said the “U.S. has made the changes needed to give blacks equal rights.” 67 percent of the younger group said the United States has done enough for blacks, and 28 percent said that the country needs to do more to give blacks equal rights.
  • When asked by Reason if they would consider voting for Clinton, 53 percent of those surveyed said yes, and 27 percent said no. Both Joe Biden, the vice president, and Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, received more yeses than noes.
  • every one of the prospective Republican presidential candidates pollsters mentioned — Christie, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush and Bobby Jindal — received more noes than yeses from millennials, by margins ranging from two noes for every yes to four noes for every yes
  • By a margin of 70-35, millennials in the Reason survey chose “competition is primarily good; it stimulates people to work hard and develop new ideas” over “competition is primarily harmful; it brings out the worst in people.” By 64-25, millennials picked “profit is generally good because it encourages businesses to provide valued products to attract customers” as opposed to “profit is generally bad because it encourages businesses to take advantage of their customers and employees.”
  • In some other respects, the millennial voters studied by Reason appear to hold orthodox liberal views: they support more spending to help the poor, even if it means higher taxes; government action to guarantee a living wage, enough for everyone to eat and have a place to sleep; and a government guarantee of health insurance. Conversely, majorities of the same voters believe that wealth should be distributed according to achievement as opposed to need, and that “people should be allowed to keep what they produce, even if there are others with greater needs.”
  • “You may have issue differences within the Democratic Party, but they become irrelevant when confronted by a Republican Party determined to turn elections into cultural conflicts,” Greenberg said in a phone interview. “These differences don’t matter in the context of a Republican party that brings out the commonality of the Democratic Party.”
  • Money, in Leege’s view, will be likely to trump the demographic trends favoring Democrats. Continue reading the main story 378 Comments Leege raises a fundamental question. The Democratic Party could well gain strength politically as it edges away from economic liberalism to a coalition determined to protect personal liberties from conservative moral constraint.
  • Corporate America faces a divided Democratic Party, vulnerable to the kind of lobbying pressures that the business elite specializes in. Under this scenario, Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce will enjoy increased leverage in the policy-making arenas of Congress and the executive branch despite – or even because – of Democratic political success.
Javier E

America Is Becoming More Liberal - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The story of the Democratic Party’s journey leftward has two chapters. The first is about the presidency of George W. Bush. Before Bush, unapologetic liberalism was not the Democratic Party’s dominant creed. The party had a strong centrist wing
  • Centrist Democrats believed that Reagan, for all his faults, had gotten some big things right. The Soviet Union had been evil. Taxes had been too high. Excessive regulation had squelched economic growth. The courts had been too permissive of crime. Until Democrats acknowledged these things, the centrists believed, they would neither win the presidency nor deserve to.
  • In the late 1980s and the 1990s, an influential community of Democratic-aligned politicians, strategists, journalists, and wonks believed that critiquing liberalism from the right was morally and politically necessary.
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  • Bush also destroyed centrist Democrats intellectually, by making it impossible for them to credibly critique liberalism from the right.
  • . In the late ’80s and the ’90s, centrist Democrats had also argued that Reagan’s decision to boost defense spending and aid the Afghan mujahideen had helped topple the Soviet empire. But in 2003, when Bush invaded Iraq, he sparked the greatest foreign-policy catastrophe since Vietnam.
  • If the lesson of the Reagan era had been that Democrats should give a Republican president his due, the lesson of the Bush era was that doing so brought disaster.
  • In the Senate, Bush’s 2001 tax cut passed with 12 Democratic votes; the Iraq War was authorized with 29. As the calamitous consequences of these votes became clear, the revolt against them destroyed the Democratic Party’s centrist wing
  • With the Dean campaign came an intellectual revolution inside the Democratic Party. His insurgency helped propel Daily Kos, a group blog dedicated to stiffening the liberal spine. It energized the progressive activist group MoveOn. It also coincided with Paul Krugman’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal columnist and Jon Stewart’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal television personality.
  • All of this has shaped the Clinton campaign’s response to Sanders. At the first Democratic debate, she noted that, unlike him, she favors “rein[ing] in the excesses of capitalism” rather than abandoning it altogether. But the only specific policy difference she highlighted was gun control, on which she attacked him from the left.
  • Whereas the party’s most respected thinkers had once urged Democrats to critique liberal orthodoxy, they now criticized Democrats for not defending that orthodoxy fiercely enough. The presidency of George W. Bush had made Democrats unapologetically liberal, and the presidency of Barack Obama was the most tangible result.
  • that’s only half the story. Because if George W. Bush’s failures pushed the Democratic Party to the left, Barack Obama’s have pushed it even further. If Bush was responsible for the liberal infrastructure that helped elect Obama, Obama has now inadvertently contributed to the creation of two movements—Occupy and Black Lives Matter—dedicated to the proposition that even the liberalism he espouses is not left-wing enough.
  • Todd Gitlin quotes Jeremy Varon, a close observer of Occupy who teaches at the New School for Social Research, as saying, “This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration. We thought his voice was ours. Now we know we have to speak for ourselves.
  • Occupy. The movement may have burned out, but it injected economic inequality into the American political debate
  • The same anger that sparked Occupy—directed not merely at Wall Street but at the Democratic Party elites who coddled it—fueled Bill de Blasio’s election and Elizabeth Warren’s rise to national prominence. And without Occupy, it’s impossible to understand why a curmudgeonly Democratic Socialist from Vermont is seriously challenging Hillary Clinton
  • the Democracy Alliance, the party’s most influential donor club, which includes mega-funders such as George Soros and Tom Steyer, has itself shifted leftward during the Obama years. In 2014, it gave Warren a rapturous welcome when she spoke at the group’s annual winter meeting. Last spring it announced that it was making economic inequality its top priority.
  • By the time Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, in part because of her support for the Iraq War, the mood inside the party had fundamentally changed.
  • Moreover, the Occupy-Warren-Sanders axis has influenced Clinton’s own economic agenda, which is significantly further left than the one she ran on in 2008. She has called for tougher regulation of the financial industry, mused about raising Social Security taxes on the wealthy (something she opposed in 2008), and criticized the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade agreement she once gushed about).
  • “Black Lives Matter developed in the wake of the failure of the Obama administration,” argues the Cornell sociologist Travis Gosa, a co-editor of The Hip Hop &amp; Obama Reader. “Black Lives Matter is the voice of a Millennial generation that’s been sold a ba
  • Had Black Lives Matter existed when Bill Clinton was seeking the presidency, he probably would have run against the group
  • Today, by contrast, the Democratic Establishment has responded to Black Lives Matter much as it responded to Occupy: with applause
  • what’s most remarkable isn’t Hillary Clinton’s move to the left, or the Democratic Party’s. It’s the American public’s willingness to go along.
  • Much of this shift is being driven by a changing mood among whites. Between January and April alone, according to a YouGov poll, the percentage of whites who called deaths like those of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray “isolated incident[s]” dropped 20 points. There’s even been movement within the GOP. From 2014 to 2015, the percentage of Republicans saying America needs to make changes to give blacks an equal chance rose 15 points—more than the percentage increase among Democrats or Independents.
  • Most interesting—because he is the Republican candidate with the keenest sense of how to appeal to the general electorate—has been the approach of Senator Marco Rubio. In August, a Fox News anchor asked him about Black Lives Matter. Instead of condemning the movement, Rubio told the story of an African American friend of his whom police had stopped eight or nine times over the previous 18 months even though he had never broken the law. “This is a problem our nation has to confront,” Rubio declared. Then he talked about young African Americans who get arrested for nonviolent offenses and pushed into plea deals by overworked public defenders. The government, he said, must “look for ways to divert people” from going to jail “so that you don’t get people stigmatized early in life.”
  • Conservative Republicans didn’t talk this way in the ’90s. They didn’t talk this way even in the early Obama years. The fact that Rubio does so now is more evidence that today, unlike in the mid-’60s, the debate about race and justice isn’t moving to the right. It’s moving further left
  • What’s different this time? One difference is that in the 1960s and ’70s, crime exploded, fueling a politics of fear and vengeance. Over the past two decades, by contrast, crime has plummeted. And despite some hyperbolic headlines, there’s no clear evidence that it’s rising significantly again.
  • When the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law examined polls, it found that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans now support barring discrimination against transgender people.
  • Most Americans, in other words, having decided that discriminating against lesbians and gay men was wrong, have simply extended that view to transgender people via what Flores describes as a “mechanism of attitude generalization.”
  • In polling, Americans typically say they favor smaller government in general while supporting many specific government programs. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Americans said they favored “a smaller government providing fewer services” over “a bigger government providing more services” by 37 percentage points. When Obama took power in 2009, the margin was a mere eight points. And despite the president’s many economic interventions, the most recent time Pew asked that question, in September 2014, the margin was exactly the same.
  • This intervention has sparked an angry response on the Republican right, but not among Americans as a whole.
  • On health care, the story is similar: no public backlash. When Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, most polls showed Americans opposing it by about eight to 10 points. Today, the margin is almost identical
  • Little has changed on taxes, either, even though Obama allowed some of the tax cuts passed under George W. Bush to expire. The percentage of Americans who say they pay more than their fair share in taxes is about the same as it was in the spring of 2010 (
  • in an era when government has grown more intrusive, African American activists have grown more confrontational, and long-standing assumptions about sexual orientation and gender identity have been toppled, most Americans are not yelling “stop,” as they began doing in the mid-1960s. The biggest reason: We’re not dealing with the same group of Americans.
  • On issue after issue, it is the young who are most pleased with the liberal policy shifts of the Obama era, and most eager for more
  • It is largely because of them that the percentage of Americans who want government to “promote traditional values” is now lower than at any other time since Gallup began asking the question in 1993, and that the percentage calling themselves “socially liberal” now equals the percentage calling themselves “socially conservative” for the first time since Gallup began asking that question in 1999.
  • Millennials are also sustaining support for bigger government. The young may not have a high opinion of the institutions that represent them, but they nonetheless want those institutions to do more
  • They were also 25 points more likely than those 65 and older to approve of Occupy Wall Street and 36 points more favorable toward socialism, which they actually preferred to capitalism, 49 percent to 46 percent. As the Pew report put it, “Millennials, at least so far, hold ‘baked in’ support for a more activist government.
  • The press often depicts American politics as a battle pitting ever more liberal Democrats against ever more conservative Republicans. Among the young, however, that’s inaccurate. Young Democrats may be more liberal than their elders, but so are young Republicans. According to Pew, a clear majority of young Republicans say immigrants strengthen America, half say corporate profits are too high, and almost half say stricter environmental laws are worth the cost—answers that sharply distinguish them from older members of the GOP.
  • Asked how they categorize themselves ideologically, more than two-thirds of Republican Millennials call themselves either “liberal” or “mixed,” while fewer than one-third call themselves “conservative.” Among the oldest Republicans, that breakdown is almost exactly reversed.
  • Millennials are not liberal primarily because they are young. They are liberal because their formative political experiences were the Iraq War and the Great Recession, and because they make up the most secular, most racially diverse, least nationalistic generation in American history. And none of that is likely to change.
  • America is not governed by public-opinion polls, after all. Congressional redistricting, felon disenfranchisement, and the obliteration of campaign-finance laws all help insulate politicians from the views of ordinary people, and generally empower the right. But despite these structural disadvantages, Obama has enacted a more consequential progressive agenda than either of his two Democratic predecessors did
  • If Clinton does win, it’s likely that on domestic policy, she will govern to Obama’s left. (On foreign policy, where there is no powerful left-wing activist movement like Occupy or Black Lives Matter, the political dynamics are very different.) Clinton’s campaign proposals already signal a leftward shift. And people close to her campaign suggest that among her top agenda items would be paid family leave, debt-free college tuition, and universal preschool
  • Clinton will face this reality from her first day in office. And she will face it knowing that because she cannot inspire liberals rhetorically as Obama can, they will be less likely to forgive her heresies on policy. Like Lyndon B. Johnson after John F. Kennedy, she will have to deliver in substance what she cannot deliver in style.
  • it’s likely that any Republican capable of winning the presidency in 2016 would govern to the left of George W. Bush. In the first place, winning at all would require a different coalition. When Bush won the presidency in 2000, very few Millennials could vote. In 2016, by contrast, they will constitute roughly one-third of those who turn out
  • In 2000, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians constituted 20 percent of voters. In 2016, they will constitute more than 30 percent.
  • even if the 2016 Republican nominee wins 60 percent of the white vote (more than any GOP nominee in the past four decades except Reagan, in 1984, has won), he or she will still need almost 30 percent of the minority vote. Mitt Romney got 17 percent.
  • This need to win the votes of Millennials and minorities, who lean left not just on cultural issues but on economic ones, will shape how any conceivable Republican president campaigns in the general election, and governs once in office.
  • If America’s demographics have changed since the Bush presidency, so has the climate among conservative intellectuals. There is now an influential community of “reformocons”—in some ways comparable to the New Democratic thinkers of the 1980s—who believe Republicans have focused too much on cutting taxes for the wealthy and not enough on addressing the economic anxieties of the middle and working classes.
  • The candidate closest to the reformocons is Rubio, who cites several of them by name in his recent book. He says that partially privatizing Social Security, which Bush ran on in 2000 and 2004, is an idea whose “time has passed.” And unlike Bush, and both subsequent Republican presidential nominees, Rubio is not proposing a major cut in the top income-tax rate. Instead, the centerpiece of his economic plan is an expanded child tax credit, which would be available even to Americans who are so poor that they don’t pay income taxes
  • it’s likely that were he elected, Rubio wouldn’t push through as large, or as regressive, a tax cut as Bush did in 2001 and 2003. Partly, that’s because a younger and more ethnically diverse electorate is less tolerant of such policies. Partly, it’s because Rubio’s administration would likely contain a reformocon faction more interested in cutting taxes for the middle class than for the rich. And partly, it’s because the legacy of the Bush tax cuts themselves would make them harder to replicate
  • A key figure in passing the Bush tax cuts was Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2001 warned that unless Washington lowered tax rates, surpluses might grow too large, thus producing a dangerous “accumulation of private assets by the federal government.” Greenspan’s argument gave the Bush administration crucial intellectual cover. But the idea now looks laughable. And it’s hard to imagine the current Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, endorsing large upper-income tax cuts in 2017.
  • the kind of centrist, Chamber of Commerce–friendly Democrats who helped Bush pass his tax plan in 2001—including Max Baucus, John Breaux, Mary Landrieu, Zell Miller, Max Cleland, Tim Johnson, Blanche Lambert Lincoln—barely exist anymore. The Democrats’ shift left over the past decade and a half means that a President Rubio would encounter more militant opposition than Bush did in 2001
  • the next Republican president won’t be able to return the nation to the pre-Obama era.
  • That’s what happened when Dwight Eisenhower followed Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Ike moderated the growth in government expansion that had begun in the 1930s, but he didn’t return American politics to the 1920s, when the GOP opposed any federal welfare state at all. He in essence ratified the New Deal
  • It’s also what happened when Bill Clinton followed Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. By passing punitive anticrime laws, repealing restrictions on banks, signing NAFTA, cutting government spending to balance the budget, reforming welfare, and declaring that the “era of big government is over,” Clinton acknowledged that even a Democratic president could not revive the full-throated liberalism of the 1960s and ’70s. He ratified Reaganism.
  • Barack Obama sought the presidency hoping to be the Democrats’ Reagan: a president who changed America’s ideological trajectory. And he has changed it. He has pushed the political agenda as dramatically to the left as Reagan pushed it to the right, and, as under Reagan, the public has acquiesced more than it has rebelled.
rachelramirez

Trump University's Shady Faculty - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • Photo Illustration by The Daily Beastwritten by
  • The Shady Faculty of Trump University
  • According to seminar transcripts filed in one class-action lawsuit against Trump University and reviewed by The Daily Beast, Harris told students that at 19, he found himself homeless and was forced to seek shelter in the grimy New York City subway. But his life changed, he said, when he met a “nice gentleman” who taught him about the real estate business.
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  • Despite becoming the top instructor at an institution that billed itself as a university, he didn’t have a background in education or even, according to his story, a college degree.
  • When he was hired in 2008, he was already a convicted felon—for aggravated assault, recent depositions in the Trump University case reveal. And according to 2011 divorce filings in Gwinnett County, Georgia, Harris threatened to kill his ex-wife and tried to have her Range Rover repossessed the day after she filed for a restraining order.
  • The school, which has been defunct since 2011, is currently the subject of two class-action lawsuits in California and a $40 million suit brought by Eric Schneiderman, the Attorney General from New York.
  • Trump University began in earnest on May 23, 2005, a for-profit venture with a website, TrumpUniversity.com, and a collection of courses—on entrepreneurship, real estate, and marketing—available on CD-ROM for $300 a pop.
  • From the outset, Trump University’s roster of brainy professors was a selling point. In a promotional video
  • Sonny Low, who paid $25,000 for a Trump mentorship in 2010, reported that Nowlin didn’t even “appear knowledgeable” about real estate or investing, according to one class-action lawsuit against Trump University.
  • Attendees were required to sign a waiver promising not to sue the company if they later faced legal troubles, the Enquirer reported.
  • Students started with a $1,495 three-day seminar, before some instructors, according to court papers, goaded them into buying mentorship packages totaling up to $34,995.
  • The lawsuits against Trump University claim some pupils, encouraged to increase their credit limits and to max out their credit cards, paid twice as much.
  • Trump decided to go in another direction, according to Schank. There would be no more online courses, no more lectures from ivy league professors, no more books—just seminars, with speakers like Harris
  • On social media, he posed for photos in a plush, white bathrobe on a manicured lawn, flanked by a shiny silver Hummer and Mercedes-Benz. He told students they could live like him, too, and vowed to teach them to earn $25,000 a month, according to court filings.
  • At some point, Harris was also employed by Armando Montelongo Seminars, a venture similar to Trump University and also facing lawsuits from disgruntled students who claim they were scammed.
katyshannon

Drug C.E.O. Martin Shkreli Arrested on Fraud Charges - The New York Times - 0 views

  • It has been a busy week for Martin Shkreli, the flamboyant businessman at the center of the drug industry’s price-gouging scandals. From Our Advertisers quot;frameC
  • He said he would sharply increase the cost of a drug used to treat a potentially deadly parasitic infection. He called himself “the world’s most eligible bachelor” on Twitter and railed against critics in a live-streaming YouTube video. After reportedly paying $2 million for a rare Wu-Tang Clan album, he goaded a member of the hip-hop group to “show me some respect.”
  • Then, at 6 a.m. Thursday, F.B.I. agents arrested Mr. Shkreli, 32, at his Murray Hill apartment. He was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on securities fraud and wire fraud charges.
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  • In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Shkreli said he was confident that he would be cleared of all charges.
  • Mr. Shkreli has emerged as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed for acquiring a decades-old drug used to treat an infection that can be devastating for babies and people with AIDS and, overnight, raising the price to $750 a pill from $13.50. His only mistake, he later conceded, was not raising the price more.
  • Those price increases combined with Mr. Shkreli’s jeering response to his critics has made him a lightning rod for public outrage and fodder for the presidential campaign. His company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, and others, like Valeant Pharmaceuticals, have come under fire from lawmakers and consumers for profiting from steep price increases for old drugs.
  • But the criminal charges brought against him actually relate to something else entirely — his time as a hedge fund manager and when he ran his first biopharmaceutical company, Retrophin.
  • Still, for many of his critics, Mr. Shkreli’s arrest was a comeuppance for the brash executive who has seemed to enjoy — relish, even — his public notoriety. On Thursday, a satirical New Yorker column by the humorist Andy Borowitz said Mr. Shkreli’s lawyers had informed their client their hourly legal fees had increased by 5,000 percent.
malonema1

Trump delays steel and aluminum tariffs for Canada, Mexico and European Union, pulling back on major trade threat - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • President Trump at the last minute on Monday evening announced he would again postpone imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada, Mexico and the European Union, the White House said, pushing off a key economic decision while he tries to prod foreign leaders into making trade-related concessions.
  • Trump’s strategy with the European Union is more fluid, as he has praised some countries, such as France, but chastised others, such as Germany, which he says needs to allow U.S. companies more access to consumers.
  • The late announcement — the tariffs would have kicked in at midnight — is the latest unexpected directive in Trump’s four-month effort to upend the United States’ trade relationship with more than a dozen countries. Some countries have received preferential treatment by agreeing to early changes, such as South Korea. Others, such as Japan, have been rebuffed despite repeated overtures from their leaders.
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  • “We are in uncharted territory in terms of trade policy,” said Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics. “What President Trump has done is make everything uncertain in trade policy. You don’t know on almost a day-to-day basis what trade policy is going to be and businesses find it very difficult to operate in that kind of environment.”
  • Ross said in an interview with The Washington Post that Trump was acting within his authority. He said that under Section 232 of a key U.S. trade law Trump “has very broad powers. He can raise the tariffs. He can lower them. He can let countries in and let them out.”
Javier E

Can Social Networks Do Better? We Don't Know Because They Haven't Tried - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

  • it’s not fair to say it’s Facebook or a Facebook problem. Facebook is just the latest media and communications medium. We hardly blame the technology of the book for spreading anti-Semitism via the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion
  • But of course, it’s not that simple. Social media platforms have distinct features that earlier communications media did not. The interactive nature of the media, the collection of data which is then run through algorithms and artificial intelligence creates something different.
  • All social media platforms are engineered with two basic goals: maximize the time you spend on the platform and make advertising as effective and thus as lucrative as possible. This means that social media can never be simply a common carrier, a distribution technology that has no substantial influence over the nature of the communication that travels over it.
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  • it’s a substantial difference which deprives social media platforms of the kind of hands-off logic that would make it ridiculous to say phones are bad or the phone company is responsible if planning for a mass murder was carried out over the phone.
  • the Internet doesn’t ‘do’ anything more than make the distribution of information more efficient and radically lower the formal, informal and financial barriers to entry that used to stand in the way of various marginalized ideas.
  • Social media can never plead innocence like this because the platforms are designed to addict you and convince you of things.
  • If the question is: what can social media platforms do to protect against government-backed subversion campaigns like the one we saw in the 2016 campaign the best answer is, we don’t know. And we don’t know for a simple reason: they haven’t tried.
  • The point is straightforward: the mass collection of data, harnessed to modern computing power and the chance to amass unimaginable wealth has spurred vast technological innovation.
Javier E

Germany Has Some Revolutionary Ideas, and They're Working - 0 views

  • Last year about 27 percent of its electricity came from renewable sources such as wind and solar power, three times what it got a decade ago and more than twice what the United States gets today.
  • Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy, has promised some of the most aggressive emission cuts—by 2020, a 40 percent cut from 1990 levels, and by 2050, at least 80 percent.
  • The energiewende will take much longer and will involve every single German—more than 1.5 million of them, nearly 2 percent of the population, are selling electricity to the grid right now
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  • “It’s a project for a generation; it’s going to take till 2040 or 2050, and it’s hard,” said Gerd Rosenkranz, a former journalist at Der Spiegel who’s now an analyst at Agora Energiewende, a Berlin think tank. “It’s making electricity more expensive for individual consumers. And still, if you ask people in a poll, Do you want the energiewende? then 90 percent say yes.”
  • The Germans have an origin myth: It says they came from the dark and impenetrable heart of the forest
  • . The forest became the place where Germans go to restore their souls—a habit that predisposed them to care about the environment.
  • So in the late 1970s, when fossil fuel emissions were blamed for killing German forests with acid rain, the outrage was nationwide. The oil embargo of 1973 had already made Germans, who have very little oil and gas of their own, think about energy. The threat ofwaldsterben, or forest death, made them think harder.
  • I came away thinking there would have been no energiewende at all without antinuclear sentiment—the fear of meltdown is a much more powerful and immediate motive than the fear of slowly rising temperatures and seas.
  • energy researcher Volker Quaschning put it this way: “Nuclear power affects me personally. Climate change affects my kids. That’s the difference.”
  • NG STAFF; EVAN APP
  • Demonstrators in the 1970s and ’80s were protesting not just nuclear reactors but plans to deploy American nuclear missiles in West Germany. The two didn’t seem separable. When the German Green Party was founded in 1980, pacifism and opposition to nuclear power were both central tenets.
  • Chernobyl was a watershed.
  • The environmental movement’s biggest mistake has been to say, ‘Do less. Tighten your belts. Consume less,’ ” Fell said. “People associate that with a lower quality of life. ‘Do things differently, with cheap, renewable electricity’—that’s the message.”
  • It was 1990, the year Germany was officially reunified—and while the country was preoccupied with that monumental task, a bill boosting the energiewende made its way through the Bundestag without much public notice. Just two pages long, it enshrined a crucial principle: Producers of renewable electricity had the right to feed into the grid, and utilities had to pay them a “feed-in tariff.” Wind turbines began to sprout in the windy north.
  • The biogas, the solar panels that cover many roofs, and especially the wind turbines allow Wildpoldsried to produce nearly five times as much electricity as it consumes.
  • In a recent essay William Nordhaus, a Yale economist who has spent decades studying the problem of addressing climate change, identified what he considers its essence: free riders. Because it’s a global problem, and doing something is costly, every country has an incentive to do nothing and hope that others will act. While most countries have been free riders, Germany has behaved differently: It has ridden out ahead. And in so doing, it has made the journey easier for the rest of us.
  • Fell’s law, then, helped drive down the cost of solar and wind, making them competitive in many regions with fossil fuels. One sign of that: Germany’s tariff for large new solar facilities has fallen from 50 euro cents a kilowatt-hour to less than 10. “We’ve created a completely new situation in 15 years
  • Germans paid for this success not through taxes but through a renewable-energy surcharge on their electricity bills. This year the surcharge is 6.17 euro cents per kilowatt-hour, which for the average customer amounts to about 18 euros a month—a hardship for some
  • The German economy as a whole devotes about as much of its gross national product to electricity as it did in 1991.
  • Ideally, to reduce emissions, Germany should replace lignite with gas. But as renewables have flooded the grid, something else has happened: On the wholesale market where contracts to deliver electricity are bought and sold, the price of electricity has plummeted, such that gas-fired power plants and sometimes even plants burning hard coal are priced out of the market.
  • Old lignite-fired power plants are rattling along at full steam, 24/7, while modern gas-fired plants with half the emissions are standing idle.
  • “Of course we have to find a track to get rid of our coal—it’s very obvious,” said Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in the environment ministry. “But it’s quite difficult. We are not a very resource-rich country, and the one resource we have is lignite.”
  • Vattenfall formally inaugurated its first German North Sea wind park, an 80-turbine project called DanTysk that lies some 50 miles offshore. The ceremony in a Hamburg ballroom was a happy occasion for the city of Munich too. Its municipal utility, Stadtwerke München, owns 49 percent of the project. As a result Munich now produces enough renewable electricity to supply its households, subway, and tram lines. By 2025 it plans to meet all of its demand with renewables.
  • Last spring Gabriel proposed a special emissions levy on old, inefficient coal plants; he soon had 15,000 miners and power plant workers, encouraged by their employers, demonstrating outside his ministry. In July the government backed down. Instead of taxing the utilities, it said it would pay them to shut down a few coal plants—achieving only half the planned emissions savings. For the energiewende to succeed, Germany will have to do much more.
  • The government’s goal is to have a million electric cars on the road by 2020; so far there are about 40,000. The basic problem is that the cars are still too expensive for most Germans, and the government hasn’t offered serious incentives to buy them—it hasn’t done for transportation what Fell’s law did for electricity.
  • “The strategy has always been to modernize old buildings in such a way that they use almost no energy and cover what they do use with renewables,” said Matthias Sandrock, a researcher at the Hamburg Institute. “That’s the strategy, but it’s not working. A lot is being done, but not enough.”
  • All over Germany, old buildings are being wrapped in six inches of foam insulation and refitted with modern windows. Low-interest loans from the bank that helped rebuild the war-torn west with Marshall Plan funds pay for many projects. Just one percent of the stock is being renovated every year, though
  • For all buildings to be nearly climate neutral by 2050—the official goal—the rate would need to double at least.
  • here’s the thing about the Germans: They knew the energiewende was never going to be a walk in the forest, and yet they set out on it. What can we learn from them? We can’t transplant their desire to reject nuclear power. We can’t appropriate their experience of two great nation-changing projects—rebuilding their country when it seemed impossible, 70 years ago, and reunifying their country when it seemed forever divided, 25 years ago. But we can be inspired to think that the energiewende might be possible for other countries too.
  • At the peak of the boom, in 2012, 7.6 gigawatts of PV panels were installed in Germany in a single year—the equivalent, when the sun is shining, of seven nuclear plants. A German solar-panel industry blossomed, until it was undercut by lower-cost manufacturers in China—which took the boom worldwide
  • Curtailing its use is made harder by the fact that Germany’s big utilities have been losing money lately—because of the energiewende, they say; because of their failure to adapt to the energiewende, say their critics. E.ON, the largest utility, which owns Grafenrheinfeld and many other plants, declared a loss of more than three billion euros last year.
  • “The utilities in Germany had one strategy,” Flasbarth said, “and that was to defend their track—nuclear plus fossil. They didn’t have a strategy B.”
  • In a conference room, Olaf Adermann, asset manager for Vattenfall’s lignite operations, explained that Vattenfall and other utilities had never expected renewables to take off so fast. Even with the looming shutdown of more nuclear reactors, Germany has too much generating capacity.
katherineharron

90% of people are biased against women. That's the challenge we face - CNN - 0 views

  • Almost 90% of the world's men, and women, are biased in some way against women, according to the Gender Social Norms Index. Half of men and women feel that men make better political leaders. More than 56% feel that men have more right to a job and/or make better business executives. Read Moreclose dialogGet the strongest, smartest opinion takes of the weekSign up for CNN Opinion’s Provoke/Persuade weekly newsletter.Please enter aboveProvoke/Persuade MeBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy. Thanks For SubscribingContinue Readingclose dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1118904 *//* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1118904 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;padding: 38px 40px 30px 40px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 400px;padding: 20px;}}@media all and (min-width: 737px) and (max-width: 1024px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 737px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 285px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {background-color: #1a1a1a;border-style: none;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 170px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 20px;stroke: rgb(169, 169, 169);}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-f4RmyBG {width: 100%;padding: 0px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-f4RmyBG {width: 90%;padding: 0px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa {width: 80px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa {text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa> *:first-child {position: absolute;left: 30;top: 20px;width: 80px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa> *:first-child {position: relative;left: 0;top: -10px;width: 80px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX {width: 100%;padding: 20px 0 20px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX {padding: 0 0 15px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX> *:first-child {font-size: 28px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;color: white;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX> *:first-child {font-size: 25px;}}@media all and (min-width: 737px) and (max-width: 1024px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX> *:first-child {font-size: 30px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO {padding: 0px 0px 20px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO {width: auto;padding: 0px 0px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO> *:first-child {font-size: 17px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;color: white;letter-spacing: 0.01em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO> *:first-child {font-size: 13px;padding: 0px 20px ;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-AjvDVXy {width: 100%;padding: 0px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-AjvDVXy {width: 300px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-KUTn3wM .bx-el {padding: 15px;font-size: 12px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;border-style: solid;border-color: rgb(220, 220, 220);}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-KUTn3wM .bx-el {font-size: 12px;padding: 12px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-
  • Around the world, women are equally likely to vote, but only 10% out of 193 heads of government are female, according to the Pew Research Center. Women are overrepresented in low-wage employment, but represent only 21% of employers and 12% of billionaires. They are about equally represented in jobs at S&amp;P Fortune 500 companies, but represent only 5.8% of the total CEOs, the index found.
  • People's reactions to a woman's pregnancy at work is a good example of how much bias still exists. In the United States, as recently as 2011, some employers still fired employees on the spot who had become pregnant, according to a report by the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law. (That's illegal.) More subtly, women announcing a pregnancy may be taken off the partner track or denied raises and bonuses. (Also illegal.) A pregnancy can easily reset the course of a woman's career. Pregnancy discrimination is widespread and difficult to police.
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