Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items matching "agenda" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
10More

Republicans Splinter Over Whether to Make a Full Break From Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-republicans.html gop trump legacy crisis politics
shared by Javier E on 09 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • “We are divided about even ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’’’ Mr. Roy said in an impassioned speech on the House floor Wednesday night. He said those words once united the nation but now they “tear us apart because we disagree about what they even mean.’’
  • Republicans may recover next year the way minority parties usually do in a new president’s first midterm election — with an oppositional message against Democrats. But their longer-term challenges could prove harder to resolve. The party drifted from any unifying policy vision in the Trump years and memorably did not even create a party platform last year.
  • “The party has to admit its failures and it has to bring party leadership from all demographics together in pursuit of a common agenda,” Mr. Huntsman said, adding, “We’ve got to basically start from a blank slate.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Some Republicans, particularly those who were always critical of Mr. Trump, are adamant that his exile will reveal him to be more of a spent force than a power broker. The president’s political legacy, they say, is one of defeat and division.
  • “Trump is a political David Koresh,” said Billy Piper, a former chief of staff to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, referring to the cult leader who died with his followers during an F.B.I. siege in Waco, Texas. “He sees the end coming and wants to burn it all down and take as many with him as possible.”
  • If that means standing up to the base in order to achieve something, they’ll do it,” Mr. Reed predicted.
  • Representative Tom Reed of New York, who has emerged as a leader of more moderate Republicans in the House, said Thursday that the party needed to begin “not worrying about base politics as much, and standing up to that base.” He argued that Republicans should pursue compromise legislation with Mr. Biden on issues like climate change, and forecast that a sizable number of Republicans would take that path.
  • Mr. Reed warned his party that the Democrats would depict the G.O.P. as a dangerous party in 2022 if they did not rebut that charge.
  • “They’re going to, obviously, paint us with the backdrop of yesterday,” he said, alluding to the mob violence.
  • Ms. Kim, who is one of a cohort of Republican female and minority candidates who helped the party cut deeply into the Democratic majority in the last election, acknowledged that she would most likely face “some blowback from the base” for voting to certify Mr. Biden’s election. But she said that should not be a primary consideration as Republicans emerge from the Trump era.
4More

GOP Splits Over Post-Trump Path - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...er-post-trump-path-11610147555 gop strategy politics crisis
shared by Javier E on 10 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In Wall Street Journal/NBC News surveys throughout 2020, a majority of about 60% of Republicans described themselves as supporters of the president rather than supporters of the GOP itself, and Mr. Trump earned a near-100% approval rating among those voters.
  • Many GOP lawmakers and strategists said Mr. Trump had helped the party by cementing its relationship with working-class voters while promoting an agenda of low-tax, center-right policies that could help the GOP regain support among suburban voters turned off by the president’s personal style. They pointed to the many GOP House candidates who drew more support than the president in the 2020 elections as evidence that the two voter groups can be bridged and that candidates can build coalitions that don’t rely heavily on Mr. Trump.
  • “Some of the suburban voters have been turned off for four years by Donald Trump’s manner and style,” said Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.). “But they don’t want their taxes raised. They don’t want the police defunded. They don’t want open borders. In the meantime, the same policies appeal to a lot of the new voters who have joined our party over the last five years.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “What Republicans need to figure out is the people who have been systematically lied to as to the results of this election—how do you re-engage with those folks who are aligned ideologically and not radical in any way, but misinformed?” Mr. Holmes said. “How do you bring them back into the fold and start communicating with them in a much more rational way about the governance of the United States?”
15More

Scholars Return to 'Culture of Poverty' Ideas - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...18poverty.html culture poverty development wealth economics
shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed. “We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,”
  • With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture, but they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects: Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.
  • defines culture as the way “individuals in a community develop an understanding of how the world works and make decisions based on that understanding.”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • the reason a neighborhood turns into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,” believing that “laws were made to be broken”?
  • Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.
  • For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.
  • “Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.
  • Views of the cultural roots of poverty “play important roles in shaping how lawmakers choose to address poverty issues,”
  • Younger academics like Professor Small, 35, attributed the upswing in cultural explanations to a “new generation of scholars without the baggage of that debate.”
  • The authors claimed to have taken family background into account, Professor Wilson said, but “they had not captured the cumulative effects of living in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods.”He added, “I realized we needed a comprehensive measure of the environment, that we must consider structural and cultural forces.”
  • Scholars like Professor Wilson, 74, who have tilled the field much longer, mentioned the development of more sophisticated data and analytical tools. He said he felt compelled to look more closely at culture after the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which attributed African-Americans’ lower I.Q. scores to genetics.
  • a study by Professor Sampson, 54, that found that growing up in areas where violence limits socializing outside the family and where parents haven’t attended college stunts verbal ability, lowering I.Q. scores by as much as six points, the equivalent of missing more than a year in school
  • Conservatives also deserve credit, said Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, for their sustained focus on family values and marriage even when cultural explanations were disparaged.
  • even now some sociologists avoid words like “values” and “morals” or reject the idea that, as The Annals put it, “a group’s culture is more or less coherent.” Watered-down definitions of culture, Ms. Hymowitz complained, reduce some of the new work to “sociological pablum.”
  • “What a concept. Values, norms, beliefs play very important roles in the way people meet the challenges of poverty.”
12More

Opinion: After the pandemic recovery, we must tackle the national debt - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html US crisis pandemic economics Politics Culture policy Biden national-debt funding
shared by aidenborst on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Few of our political leaders are eager to deal with the national debt. It's an issue that entails very challenging policy solutions, and thus tends to be used more as a cudgel to stop expensive policies from moving forward, than as an issue in its own right.
  • So even with a $21 trillion debt serving as a flashing warning sign, and with no plan to get the borrowing under control once the economy is strong again, there is very little political interest in doing something about it.
  • Now President-elect Biden will be inheriting the second-highest debt of any American president, second to President Truman who came into office at the end of World War II, and the very worst situation if you look at where the debt is headed long term, with about $5 billion in borrowing per day.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • This needs to be addressed or else future generations of Americans will still be paying the price in decades to come.
  • Debt isn't always bad, however. There are times when it is useful, and now is one of those times. We need money to fight the pandemic, help the millions of people whose lives have been damaged, support businesses and prop up the economy until things get back to normal. We aren't out of the woods yet, even with the recent positive vaccine news, and we need to borrow more.
  • Here then is what the Biden administration should do. First, focus on getting the pandemic under control, helping those in need and supporting the economy.
  • These could include sensible cost control measures, such as increasing the retirement age and encouraging those who want to continue to work part time into retirement to do so.
  • Even at today's rock-bottom interest rates, we could quadruple federal education spending or send every family an annual check of $2,200 with the money we are spending on interest.
  • Once the economy is strong enough, as indicated by growth and employment (rather than political whims), the administration and Congress should gradually implement sensible measures to get control of the debt. This could include repealing some or all of the irresponsible tax cuts of the past years, reducing health care costs throughout the economy, cutting some of the near $1.4 trillion of tax breaks in the code and restoring sensible spending caps.
  • We also need to address our major trust fund programs that are facing insolvency in the upcoming years, including Social Security and Medicare.
  • Just because more debt is necessary right now doesn't mean it is harmless. We entered the last recession with debt as a share of GDP at 35%. This one is at 80% and we will leave it at well over 100%. US debt is growing faster than the economy and will break the all-time record set just after World War II as soon as 2023.
  • To Biden's credit, his campaign plan included trillions of dollars in revenue raisers and spending reforms, creating opportunities for lawmakers to fund new public investments in a fiscally responsible manner. It is a start, but there will be much more to do. Debt naysayers will want the new administration to opt for the free lunch approach -- borrowing rather than paying for new priorities -- but that is a dangerous economic plan in the long run that invites serious risk and leaves us vulnerable at a time we should be pursing an agenda of economic strength.
6More

Even With $900 Billion Stimulus, Biden Faces Fragile Economy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-economy-pandemic.html Politics
shared by anonymous on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Despite new pandemic aid, he confronts an economic crisis unlike any since he last entered office in 2009. And political headwinds have only stiffened.
  • With his presidential inauguration just weeks away, Joseph R. Biden Jr. is confronting an economic crisis that is utterly unparalleled and yet eerily familiar.
  • While this pandemic-related recession was larger in terms of initial job losses and closures, it is collateral damage from a health emergency and not a crack in the global financial system.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republicans’ leader in the Senate, was often intent on blocking Mr. Obama’s agenda, but his party was in the minority.
  • Senate Republicans have been dead set against providing that kind of direct aid. Mr. McConnell has criticized it as a “blue-state bailout,” even though many red and blue states — and rural areas in particular — have lost revenues and public sector jobs.
  • “We’re in a moment where the risk of doing too little outweighs the risk of doing too much,” he said.
17More

Trump impeachment: Democrats promise quick move to impeachment if 25th Amendment push f... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html Politics US crisis Culture policy history trump gop constitution removal impeachment Biden
shared by aidenborst on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Pelosi said the House will attempt to pass a resolution by unanimous consent Monday morning calling for Pence and Trump's Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from office.
  • The resolution will call on Pence to respond within 24 hours and, if not, the House would move to impeach the President.
  • "In protecting our Constitution and our Democracy, we will act with urgency, because this President represents an imminent threat to both. As the days go by, the horror of the ongoing assault on our democracy perpetrated by this President is intensified and so is the immediate need for action," Pelosi said.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • House Democrats are still discussing whether a vote to impeach Trump could be Tuesday or Wednesday, per aides.
  • "We'll take the vote that we should take in the House, and (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) will make the determination as to when is the best time to get that vote and get the managers appointed and move that legislation over to the Senate," Clyburn told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union."
  • "It just so happens that if it didn't go over there for 100 days, it could -- let's give President-elect Biden the 100 days he needs to get his agenda off and running, and maybe we'll send the articles sometime after that," the South Carolina Democrat added.
  • By impeaching and removing Trump, even at this late stage of his term, the Senate could subsequently vote to disqualify him from ever holding federal office again, taking an extraordinary action against a former president.
  • The comments from Clyburn come as Democrats grapple with how impeaching Trump for a second time could impact Biden's early days in office, when he is working to get administration appointments approved in the Senate and tackling legislative priorities, like another coronavirus relief package.
  • Pelosi said in a interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" set to air Sunday evening that she liked the idea of invoking the 25th Amendment "because it gets rid of him," but explained, "one of the motivations people have for advocating for impeachment" is to prevent Trump from holding office again.
  • "There's strong support in the Congress for impeaching the President a second time," she said.
  • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell previously made clear in a memo that even if the House moved in the coming days to impeach Trump, the Senate would not return to session before January 19. That would place the start of the trial on January 20 -- the date of Biden's inauguration.
  • Democrats plan to introduce their impeachment resolution, which already has more than 190 co-sponsors, on Monday and sources tell CNN that the party is looking at having votes no sooner than Wednesday but they are still sorting out their plans.
  • "The train has left the station on impeachment," an official close to Biden told CNN. "Trying to stop it would not only fail, but put Biden on the wrong foot with progressives and most Democrats across the party."
  • Already, several congressional Republicans have joined Democrats in making clear they want Trump to leave office, though not all agree that impeachment is the right option.
  • Sen. Pat Toomey told Tapper Sunday that he thinks Trump should resign. The Pennsylvania Republican -- now the second Republican US senator to call for Trump's resignation -- had previously said he thinks Trump "committed impeachable offenses," but that he wasn't sure removing him this close to the end of his term was the right course of action.
  • Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Friday that the President should step down from office, telling the Anchorage Daily News of Trump, "I want him out. He has caused enough damage."
  • Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, meanwhile, has endorsed invoking the 25th Amendment, which would force Trump's removal.
6More

The Business Rules the Trump Administration Is Racing to Finish - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...usiness-regulations-biden.html gop election trump US
shared by clairemann on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In the remaining days of his administration, President Trump is rushing to put into effect a raft of new regulations and executive orders that are intended to put his stamp on business, trade and the economy.
  • Previous presidents in their final term have used the period between the election and the inauguration to take last-minute actions to extend and seal their agendas.
  • Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday banning transactions with eight Chinese software applications, including Alipay.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The Trump administration recently filed a petition asking the Federal Communications Commission to narrow its interpretation of a powerful legal shield for social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube. If the commission doesn’t act before Inauguration Day, the matter will land in the desk of whomever Mr. Biden picks to lead the agency.
  • Separately, the Trump administration has also banned the import of some cotton from the Xinjiang region, where China has detained vast numbers of people who are members of ethnic minorities and forced them to work in fields and factories. In another move, the administration prohibited several Chinese companies, including the chip maker SMIC and the drone maker DJI, from buying American products.
  • The Department of Transportation in December authorized a rule, sought by airlines and travel agents, that limits the department’s authority over the industry by defining what constitutes an unfair and deceptive practice.
18More

How DHS and ICE Are Making The Case for Trump's Re-Election | Time - 0 views

time.com/...-for-donald-trumps-re-election gop trump US politics crisis policy
shared by clairemann on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • In the final weeks leading up to the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have launched a highly unusual publicity blitz to spotlight immigration enforcement actions in key battleground states where President Donald Trump is trailing his opponent Joe Biden in the polls.
  • These public announcements by senior leaders ahead of the election, which former officials tell TIME are abnormal, if not unprecedented, have been held to publicize mostly routine immigration enforcement operations that would usually have been revealed with little fanfare.
  • Instead, DHS and ICE officials have used them as a platform to aggressively make the case for the president’s immigration policies, often taking on a markedly Trumpian tone and echoing parts of his stump speech.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and his deputy Ken Cuccinelli have talked about immigrants taking American jobs, blasted Democrat-run sanctuary cities, touted “America First” and warned of “evil people who seek to travel to the United States with the intent of harming and killing Americans.”
  • In Phoenix last week, Wolf warned that there would be a surge in migration and an “unimaginable public health crisis” at the southern border if Trump were to lose the election — a series of nakedly political statements that stunned many former officials.
  • “The rhetoric that’s come out of Wolf and Cuccinelli is appearing to be a propaganda arm of the White House,”
  • The arrests were part of “Operation OPTical Illusion,” a crackdown on the federal Optional Tactical Training program, which allows international students to work in their field of study while on a U.S. student visa.
  • Cuccinelli directly tied this immigration enforcement action to Trump’s agenda, saying the arrests “will open up those jobs for American workers” and emphasizing that this “has been a very high priority for this President.”
  • Earlier in October, ICE put up bold black and red billboards in several parts of Pennsylvania, featuring the faces of six immigrants and their charges of burglary, robbery, and assault in big lettering. The agency described them as “at-large immigration violators who may pose a public safety threat” and said the campaign was meant to “educate the public about the dangers of non-cooperation policies.
  • “DHS is showing us a textbook example of why we have a federal law against government officials using their positions to support a political campaign,”
  • The politically significant locations of these press conferences, and the presence of senior leadership, means each event has been covered by local news and circulated on social media, likely reaching their intended in-state audience and beyond.
  • “the Trump administration is building [a] new wall and doing so faster than ever before” and “the Trump admin is putting America first by protecting American workers.” On Thursday, Wolf posted an almost 2-minute video about news media raising questions about Trump’s promised border wall in what was effectively a campaign ad, with the message: “They said it couldn’t be done…They were wrong. 400 times and counting.”
  • “These billboards are clearly intended to fuel anti-immigrant fervor one month before the election,”
  • “Top DHS officials are acting more like campaign surrogates than public servants, and they need to be held accountable.”
  • “I am deeply disturbed that ICE is spending government dollars and putting lives at risk in furtherance of what is described as a political messaging campaign,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, wrote in a letter to Pham in early October.
  • Immigration lawyers and advocates have raised concerns the agency has also been timing other law enforcement actions for political purposes. In September, ICE announced that 19 non-citizens in North Carolina had been charged with illegally voting in the 2016 election.
  • This time around, the ICE announcement about the charges — which came more than three years after the investigation started — were also “highly suspect, and likely to be politically driven,” says Helen Parsonage, an attorney who represents five of the non-citizens.
  • While Trump’s 2016 rallies were often filled with vivid accounts of immigrant crime, “build the wall” chants and infamous readings of a poem about a snake to illustrate the threat posed by immigrants and refugees, it’s a theme he’s rarely touched on in his 2020 rallies.
7More

Voting System in Maine Threatens Collins in Final Days of Close Senate Race - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...collins-sara-gideon-maine.html US politics
shared by tsainten on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • moderate pragmatist.
  • It has barely shifted since Ms. Gideon entered the fray more than 16 months ago, hoping to capitalize on liberal anger against Mr. Trump and outrage over Ms. Collins’s vote to confirm Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court to deny the Republican senator a fifth term.
  • either candidate has been able to maintain a steady advantage in the race.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • It allows voters to list a second candidate and counts those preferences as votes if no one reaches 50 percent when the first-choice votes are tabulated. The system could prove particularly dangerous for Ms. Collins — who like Ms. Gideon has consistently drawn below 50 percent in public polls conducted in recent months — because Lisa Savage, a progressive running as an independent in the race, has urged her supporters to list Ms. Gideon second.
  • her supporters and opponents both deemed it a necessary political maneuver to woo moderate voters, with Democrats noting that it had done nothing to affect the outcome.
  • Max Linn, a brash businessman, secured 1.7 percent of the vote while Ms. Savage, a teacher who has ties to the Maine Green Independent Party, secured 4.7 percent, behind Ms. Gideon at 46.6 percent and Ms. Collins at 43.4 percent. The poll had a 3.3 percent margin of error.
  • Ms. Gideon frequently summoned the specter of Mr. Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, to cast the race in national terms and argue that it was vital for Democrats to control the White House and Congress to set the agenda in Washington.
12More

As Election Day Arrives, Trump Shifts Between Combativeness and Grievance - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-campaign.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Trump arrives at Election Day on Tuesday toggling between confidence and exasperation, bravado and grievance, and marinating in frustration that he is trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr., whom he considers an unworthy opponent.
  • Trailing in most polls, Mr. Trump has careened through a marathon series of rallies in the last week, trying to tear down Mr. Biden and energize his supporters, but also fixated on crowd size and targeting perceived enemies like the news media and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s infectious disease expert whom he suggested on Sunday he might try to dismiss after the election.
  • At every turn, the president has railed that the voting system is rigged against him and has threatened to sue when the election is over, in an obvious bid to undermine an electoral process strained by the coronavirus pandemic
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • and perhaps the hope that everything will work out for him in the end, the way it did four years ago when he surprised himself, his advisers and the world by winning the White House.
  • But by enclosing himself in the thin bubble of his own worldview, Mr. Trump may have further severed himself from the political realities of a country in crisis. And that, in turn, has helped enable Mr. Trump to wage a campaign offering no central message, no clear agenda for a second term and no answer to the woes of the pandemic.
  • Beyond the capital, though, some Republicans insist that Mr. Trump can again defy the odds, and that a devoted base will fuel a traditional G.O.P. surge in Election Day voters.
  • Seldom far from Mr. Trump’s thoughts, however, is the possibility of defeat — and the potential consequences of being ejected from the White House.
  • In unguarded moments, Mr. Trump has for weeks told advisers that he expects to face intensifying scrutiny from prosecutors if he loses. He is concerned not only about existing investigations in New York, but the potential for new federal probes as well, according to people who have spoken with him.
  • Mr. Trump’s advisers do continue to believe he has a realistic chance of besting Mr. Biden, but they concede it would take a last-minute breakthrough in one of the Great Lakes states where he is currently trailing.
  • The president himself has done little to strengthen his chances in the final days of the race.
  • He has frequently used his speeches to deliver long diatribes against Mr. Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, even though some Trump advisers believe the whole subject is a sideshow in the midst of a public-health disaster. But Trump associates say he simply enjoys attacking the Biden family.
  • What confounds some Republicans is how little Mr. Trump is discussing last month’s confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court; some G.O.P. senators have made that achievement a centerpiece of their campaigns.
22More

Fact check: Trump's policies for Black Americans - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...lack-americans-policies-433744 HBCU Trump Policy US
shared by tsainten on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Trump won just 8 percent of Black voters in 2016 and has talked more about criminals than criminal justice in the closing days of the campaign. He did, however, sign the bipartisan First Step Act and has granted 28 pardons and 16 sentence commutations.
  • Former President Barack Obama tapped two Black attorneys general to serve in his administration, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and he used his executive authority to create a task force on 21st century policing and granted clemency to more than 1,900 people, the highest figure since Harry Truman’s administration granted clemency to more than 2,000 people.
  • “Black voters are looking for a comprehensive agenda that will get at the structural barriers blocking Black mobility in this country,”
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • the First Step Act would release more than 3,100 federal prison inmates and said its retroactive sentencing reform had led to nearly 1,700 sentence reductions. The Sentencing Project said last year that Black Americans made up 91 percent of everyone receiving reductions.
  • Trump reinstituted the federal death penalty. Seven people have been executed this year under the policy — five were white, one was Native American and the other was Black. And there are 55 federal death-row prisoners. Twenty-five are African Americans, 22 are white, seven are Latino and one is Asian.
  • Under the Trump administration, the Black unemployment rate steadily improved, dropping to 5.4 percent at its bottom in August 2019, compared to 7.5 percent when Trump took office in January 2017. But that achievement is attributable to economic growth that was already revving when Trump took office, economists say.
  • Black workers did not see employment levels ever go “above the trend.”
  • The bill is a 10-year renewal of funding. During Obama’s eight years in office, mandatory HBCU funding ranged from almost $80 million to $85 million per year. The same has been true during Trump’s administration.
  • Even with record-low unemployment rates in 2019, Black Americans still had fewer jobs than their white counterparts — even for those with college or advanced degrees — according to research by EPI.
  • In April, when unemployment peaked at 14.7 percent — the highest level seen since the Great Depression — the unemployment rate for Black workers was even higher, at 16.7 percent. By September, the share of unemployed Black workers still struggling to find a job only dropped to 12.1 percent.
  • Many banks limited their initial application pool for the small business rescue Paycheck Protection Program to previous customers, a staff report by the House coronavirus subcommittee found. Democrats and non-profits argue that shut out many minority-owned businesses that lacked business banking relationships from the program, which offered forgivable loans to companies that kept their workers on the payroll.
  • when the labor market is tight, like it was in first three years of the Trump administration, discrimination tends to decline.
  • The amount of funding for HBCUs is “the same thing that we had under President Obama.”
  • creating “more than 8,000 opportunities zones, bringing jobs and opportunities to our inner-city families.”
  • Opportunity zones “are tax incentives to encourage those with capital gains to invest in low-income and undercapitalized communities,” according to the Tax Policy Center.
  • A feature of the president’s $1.5 trillion tax cuts, the program was intended to benefit Black, Hispanic and low-income communities. But there’s very little data about what’s actually happening in opportunity zones. There isn’t a full accounting of the number of opportunity zone projects, let alone basic information such as what those projects are, why they’re being pursued and who is benefiting from them.
  • the vast majority of opportunity zone capital appears to be going into real estate rather than operating businesses, meaning that the opportunity zones aren’t creating sustainable, long-term jobs.
  • he scrapped an Obama rule requiring localities to track patterns of segregation or lose federal funding.
  • The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development replaced the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Act with a much weaker rule in July, using a waiver to exempt the new regulation from public-comment requirements. Public comments allow people to weigh in on proposed rules before they’re finalized. But by bypassing that critical step, the agency essentially expedited a months-long process without any public input.
  • baseless fear of crime and decreased property value as attempted triggers to get at white anxiety about living with people of color — and African Americans in particular — and the idea of integration itself,”
  • new rule in September overhauling the Obama administration’s 2013 “disparate impact” rule. The new rule would have required plaintiffs to meet a higher threshold to prove unintentional discrimination — known as disparate impact — and given defendants more leeway to rebut the claims.
  • A federal court intervened this month -- the day before the rule was set to take effect last week -- issuing a preliminary nationwide injunction to bar HUD from implementing the new regulation until the merits of a lawsuit brought by civil rights advocates have been decided.
4More

John Hickenlooper Wins Colorado Senate Seat, Beating GOP Incumbent Cory Gardner | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...ate_n_5f9b1bb3c5b689d246f88683 US politics Trump
shared by kaylynfreeman on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Last month, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) said he believed President Donald Trump to be a moral and ethical man.
  • Gardner, 46, endorsed Trump once he became president and enthusiastically backed his agenda, staying quiet even when other GOP senators spoke out against his worst behavior.
  • Gardner claimed he would protect people with preexisting conditions, citing a bill he introduced with other vulnerable GOP senators designed to give them political cover on the issue ahead of the November election.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Meanwhile, unlike other vulnerable Republicans on this year’s ballot who began highlighting their occasional breaks with Trump occasionally, Gardner remained committed to the president’s priorities.
4More

NYC Officer Suspended for Blaring 'Trump 2020' During Patrol | Time - 0 views

time.com/...d-officer-suspended-trump-2020 election Trump opinion culture Policy
shared by aleija on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The New York Police Department said Sunday it has suspended an officer without pay a day after he was seen on video saying “Trump 2020” over a patrol vehicle’s loudspeaker, a violation of department rules.The suspension is effective immediately and the incident remains under investigation, the police department said.
  • Mayor Bill de Blasio promised swift action, tweeting: “ANY NYPD Officer pushing ANY political agenda while on duty will face consequences.
  • “Trump 2020,” the officer is heard saying, taunting someone on the street who was recording him. “Put it on YouTube. Put it on Facebook. Trump 2020.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The incident happened days after NYPD officials downplayed concerns that Trump’s support among law enforcement personnel, including a city police union’s endorsement, would impact how officers do their jobs—particularly when dealing with people voting or protesting against the president.
11More

The 2020 Elections Have Made the Fringes Fringy Again - Noah Rothman, Commentary Magazine - 0 views

www.commentarymagazine.com/...-made-the-fringes-fringy-again 2020 conservatism politics history Trump election outcome
shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Pro-Democrat (or anti-Republican) partisans are already convincing themselves that the party’s stumbles on Tuesday are attributable to “whiteness”—even when the voters they lost weren’t white.
  • Architect of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project,” Nikole Hannah-Jones immediately went about explaining away Donald Trump’s surprisingly strong showing in places like Miami-Dade County by attributing the victory to “white Cubans,” who are “Hispanic” only insofar as that is a “contrived ethnic category.” Influential former ESPN host Jemele Hill insisted that it is “on white people” and “no one else” if Trump had won. “I don’t trust the White vote,” former RNC Chair Michael Steele told Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart. “And I don’t trust it because, at the end of the day, it is very self-serving.”
  • This is rapidly becoming enforced dogma on the left. When elected Democrats depart from this line of thinking, they are berated and harangued until they retreat.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • No matter that weighted exit polling data found that Donald Trump increased his margins among minorities, drawing the support of 32 percent of Hispanics and double-digits among black voters, and Democrats improved their showing among whites.
  • Say goodbye to the Green New Deal, a Universal Basic Income, “debt-free” college, single-payer health care, the dissolution of the Department of Homeland Security’s border enforcement agencies, or half a dozen other big ideas that loomed ominously over American heads for the better part of two years.
  • because the consequences of Democratic weakness at the polls on Tuesday fell disproportionately on the party’s moderates in purple districts, there will be fewer voices around in 2021 to push back against what is essentially a tantalizing conspiracy theory.
  • Progressives can say goodbye to their already tenuous hopes for dramatic reforms to the institutions that govern American political life. There will be no filibuster nuking, no punitive expansion of the federal judiciary, no sweeping institutional reforms to “restructure things to fit our vision.”
  • where is the good news in all this, you ask? These voices have once again been relegated to the fringes of their respective parties. It’s the quisling moderates and dealmakers they so hate who will soon find themselves in the driver’s seat.
  • It is unlikely that we will see much productivity under divided government, but that is not the same thing as dysfunctional government—precisely the opposite,
  • If we’re entering into a period defined by equilibrium in which the federal government is all but paralyzed in the absence of some bipartisan consensus, that would at least be predictable. And predictability has been in short supply these last four years.
  • Much to the chagrin of the American system’s would-be demolishers, no one assuming the reins of power in Washington seems to have much interest in blowing anything up.
16More

In Visiting a Charred California, Trump Confronts a Scientific Reality He Denies - The ... - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...ires-trump-climate-change.html trump Policy global warming politics
shared by cartergramiak on 14 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • When President Trump flies to California on Monday to assess the state’s raging forest fires, he will come face to face with the grim consequences of a reality he has stubbornly refused to accept: the devastating effects of a warming planet.
  • “It’s mind-boggling, the ignorance that he displays on this subject,” Ms. Whitman said in an interview on Sunday. “He doesn’t understand climate change. He doesn’t particularly believe in science. It’s all about him and his re-election.”
  • Mr. Trump has doubled down on his anti-climate agenda as a way of appealing to his core supporters.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • voters may hold him and his administration accountable for brushing aside scientific experts and failing to effectively mobilize the government to minimize natural disasters that have claimed lives, damaged property and threatened economic prosperity.
  • “Talk to a firefighter if you think that climate change isn’t real,” Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles, a supporter of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, said
  • “As an historic figure, he is one of the most culpable men in America contributing to the suffering and death that is now occurring through climate-related tragedy,” Jerry Brown, the former California governor
  • The president’s record is also more consequential, experts say, because the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere has now passed the point at which scientists say it would be possible to avert many of the worst effects of global warming — even if tough emissions policies are later enacted.
  • “In both cases, there is no plan to deal with crisis,” he added.
  • the president has used his time in the nation’s highest office to aggressively promote the burning of fossil fuels, chiefly by rolling back or weakening every major federal policy intended to combat dangerous emissions. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his senior environmental officials have regularly mocked, denied or minimized the established science of human-caused climate change.
  • At the event in front of supporters in Jupiter, Fla., Mr. Trump declared himself “a great environmentalist.”
  • The report is clear about the causes — burning fossil fuels — and the effects: It found that the increased drought, flooding, storms and worsening wildfires caused by the warming planet could shrink the American economy by up to 10 percent by the end of the century.
  • he said of global warming, “I don’t know that it’s man-made,” and suggested that even as the planet warmed, “it will change back again” — an idea scientists have long debunked.
  • And Mr. Trump’s first appointee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, declared early in his tenure that carbon dioxide was not a primary contributor to global warming, a statement starkly at odds with the scientific consensus.
  • He said Mr. Trump had put in place “common sense policies that have kept our air, water and environment clean.”
  • Taken together, those rules represented the country’s first significant step toward reducing greenhouse gases, while putting the world’s largest economy at the forefront of the global effort to fight climate change.Now they are in shambles.
  • If Mr. Biden is elected, he has vowed to rejoin the Paris agreement and reinstate those rules, while pushing to enact even stronger policies, spending up to $2 trillion to promote the development of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.
26More

Supreme Court Could Give Trump Second Chance at Environmental Rollbacks - The New York ... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-environment-courts.html eco climate change Politics history us policy gop SCOTUS trump
shared by clairemann on 25 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • many of his policies are being cut down by the courts — even by Republican-appointed jurists who the administration had hoped would be friendly.
  • many of his policies are being cut down by the courts — even by Republican-appointed jurists who the administration had hoped would be friendly.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      an important note that not every part of the judicial system is partisan
  • A second term, coupled with a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court, could save some of his biggest environmental rollbacks.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      This would be absolutely detrimental for humanity
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • According to a database kept by New York University’s nonpartisan Institute for Policy Integrity, the Environmental Protection Agency has won only nine out of 47 cases in court under Mr. Trump, while the Interior Department has won four of 22.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      President Trump's agenda is based off of his own business interests that he is profiting off of: a constitutional violation if you ask me.
  • That followed decisions by judges that have thrown the future of the Dakota Access Pipeline into doubt, struck down the relaxation of protections for migratory birds and vacated the rollback of an Obama-era rule to reduce waste from natural gas flaring on federal lands.
  • “There is a sense that the administration has been in a hurry and has been sloppy,” said Jonathan H. Adler, a conservative legal expert and professor of environmental law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      A theme in the entire administration...
  • biggest rollbacks of clean water rules, curbs to greenhouse gas emissions in automobiles and power plants, and environmental reviews of infrastructure projects.
  • It is not only a sin to kill a mockingbird, it is also a crime. That has been the letter of the law for the past century.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      Poignant metaphor
  • a number of courts ruled that agencies acted illegally by providing little or no justification when they rewrote, weakened or repealed regulation.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      No facts to back up rulings...
  • “The Trump administration is impatient,” he said. “The Trump administration is sloppy. The Trump administration doesn’t like to do its homework.”
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      Preach...
  • 17 states to block the Trump administration’s revisions to a rule that significantly narrows the definition of which bodies of water are federally regulated
  • “The current record shows that D.O.J. and E.P.A. are making a solid defense of the Trump administration priorities.”
  • ignoring facts about climate change.
  • “The Trump administration, along with allies like me, wins on big-picture issues at the highest levels,” Mr. Morrisey said.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 25 Sep 20
       
      His "wins" seem facaded
  • rejected the E.P.A.’s 2019 approval of an air pollution rule for Pennsylvania that would have allowed coal-fired power plants in that state to exceed pollution limits.
  • “The administration is so reluctant to mention climate change that they get in trouble for not even mentioning it,” Mr. Gerrard said.
  • “A lot of these rollbacks are going to have very shallow roots, and perhaps no roots as all,” said David Hayes, executive director of the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center.
  • “If there’s a Democratic president, roll up your sleeves and wait for Texas to file lawsuits against President Biden,” he said.
13More

'I Feel Sorry for Americans': A Baffled World Watches the U.S. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-united-states.html US prestige international Politics pandemic
shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Myanmar is a poor country struggling with open ethnic warfare and a coronavirus outbreak that could overload its broken hospitals. That hasn’t stopped its politicians from commiserating with a country they think has lost its way.
  • “I feel sorry for Americans,” said U Myint Oo, a member of parliament in Myanmar. “But we can’t help the U.S. because we are a very small country.”
  • “Personally, it’s like watching the decline of the Roman Empire,” said Mike Bradley, the mayor of Sarnia, an industrial city on the border with Michigan, where locals used to venture for lunch.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • “The U.S.A. is a first-world country but it is acting like a third-world country,” said U Aung Thu Nyein, a political analyst in Myanmar.
  • Adding to the sense of bewilderment, Mr. Trump has refused to embrace an indispensable principle of democracy, dodging questions about whether he will commit to a peaceful transition of power after the November election should he lose.
  • “It reminds me of Belarus, when a person cannot admit defeat and looks for any means to prove that he couldn’t lose,” said Kiryl Kalbasnikau, a 29-year-old opposition activist and actor. “This would be a warning sign for any democracy.”
  • “We used to look to the U.S. for democratic governance inspiration,” said Eduardo Bohórquez, the director of Transparency International Mexico. “Sadly, this is not the case anymore.”
  • “The world sees the dismantling of social cohesion within American society and the mess in managing Covid,” said Yenny Wahid, an Indonesian politician and activist. “There is a vacuum of leadership that needs to be filled, but America is not fulfilling that leadership role.
  • Ms. Wahid, whose father was president of Indonesia after the country emerged from decades of strongman rule, said she worried that Mr. Trump’s dismissive attitude toward democratic principles could legitimize authoritarians.
  • “Trump inspired many dictators, many leaders who are interested in dictatorship, to copy his style, and he emboldened them,” she said.
  • “They now know what it’s like in other countries: violating norms, international trade and its own institutions,” said Eunice Rendon, an expert on migration and security and the director of Migrant Agenda, a nonprofit organization in Mexico. “The most powerful country in the world all of a sudden looks vulnerable.”
  • In Cambodia, which reports being largely spared by the virus so far, there is a measure of schadenfreude toward the United States. Prime Minister Hun Sen has survived as Asia’s longest serving leader by cracking down on dissent and cozying up to China.
  • “He has many nuclear weapons,” Sok Eysan, a spokesman for Mr. Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, said of Mr. Trump. “But he is careless with a disease that can’t be seen.”
25More

Opinion | The Rotting of the Republican Mind - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...republican-disinformation.html gop paranoia conspiracy theory polarization divergence epistemic crisis politics history culture
shared by Javier E on 27 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
  • We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality
  • Many people point to the interne
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?
  • My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real.
  • In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.
  • This ecosystem, Rauch wrote, operates as a funnel. It allows a wide volume of ideas to get floated, but only a narrow group of ideas survive collective scrutiny.
  • We let alt-truth talk,” Rauch said, “but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.”
  • While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities.
  • In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge.
  • In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending.
  • Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say, but also the so-called rules they use to say them.
  • People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers.
  • The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community.
  • conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.
  • For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools
  • For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have
  • For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals
  • If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.
  • Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set
  • He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source.
  • The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking.
  • That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it
  • second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.
  • Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.
11More

The Lancet's editor: 'The UK's response to coronavirus is the greatest science policy f... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...olicy-failure-for-a-generation response uk pandemic history
shared by Javier E on 14 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again is a short polemical book, building on a series of excoriating columns Horton has written in the Lancet over the past few months. He lambasts the management of the virus as “the greatest science policy failure for a generation”, attacks the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) for becoming “the public relations wing of a government that had failed its people”, calls out the medical Royal Colleges, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the British Medical Association (BMA) and Public Health England (PHE) for not reinforcing the World Health Organization’s public health emergency warning back in February, and damns the UK’s response as “slow, complacent and flat-footed”, revealing a “glaringly unprepared” government and a “broken system of obsequious politico-scientific complicity”.
  • As editor of the Lancet, he’s particularly aggrieved that the series of five academic papers the journal published in late January first describing the novel coronavirus in disturbing detail went unheeded. 
  • “In several of the papers they talked about the importance of personal protective equipment,” he reminds me. “And the importance of testing, the importance of avoiding mass gatherings, the importance of considering school closure, the importance of lockdowns. All of the things that have happened in the last three months here, they’re all in those five papers.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • What he does know, from the published reports of Sage meetings, is that scientists were “trying to be as sensitive to economic issues as they were to health issues”. That, he says, “is a dangerous place to be” because it compromises the ability of the advisory group to protect health.
  • Horton believes this pandemic is a watershed moment in history, an event that is much larger than simply a crisis in health. “Covid-19 has held a mirror up to our society,” he says, “and forced us to look at who really is vulnerable, who really does make society work, who has to literally put their lives on the line while the rest of us are secluded in our houses. We’ve discovered something about ourselves that we may have been conveniently able to hide before but we can’t hide any more. And so the question is what do we do with that knowledge now?”
  • Despite his ill-health, Horton is a boyish-looking 58 who, incredibly, has been editor of the Lancet for a quarter of a century. In that time he’s turned the journal into a major international success, frequently setting the agenda for global health. Last year he received the $100,000 Roux prize for lifetime achievement in population health, being cited as one of the field’s most “committed, articulate, and influential advocates”.
  • The debts refer to Horton’s role in publishing Andrew Wakefield’s discredited paper claiming a link between the MMR vaccination and autism. The panic that ensued led to a significant drop in vaccinations across the world, growth of the anti-vaccination movement, and lethal outbreaks of measles. Although the science was questioned from the beginning, Horton strongly defended Wakefield, whom he knew from their time working together at the Royal Free. It took 12 years before Horton finally retracted the paper, after a General Medical Council inquiry found Wakefield to have been guilty of dishonesty and deception.
  • Horton “made a catastrophic mistake in publishing that article, and that had enormous consequences both in the UK and globally”.
  • the British government and its senior scientific advisers. Horton believes that in order to restore their damaged reputation they need to acknowledge their mistakes. 
  • “I think that’s going to have to start with Sage, the chief scientific officer and the chief medical officer being very clear that the signals were missed from January. And there needs to be an acknowledgment that there was a collusion that took place between scientific and medical advisers and politicians which was in the end damaging to public health.”
  • Horton acknowledges that from the last conversation he had with him, Whitty “thinks that I don’t understand what he’s trying to achieve”. Yet there remains a case to answer about why we took so long to lock down, and why, despite all the warnings first from China and then from Italy, that we seemed to be caught unawares by the speed and lethality of the virus.
12More

'Cancel culture' doesn't stifle debate, but it does challenge the old order | Billy Bra... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...free-speech-young-people cancel culture liberty accountability free speech culture politics
shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • a quote from the preface of Animal Farm: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
  • Orwell’s quote is not a defence of liberty; it’s a demand for licence, and has become a foundational slogan for those who wilfully misconstrue one for the other.
  • Over the past decade, the right to make inflammatory statements has become a hot button issue for the reactionary right, who have constructed tropes such as political correctness and virtue signalling to enable them to police the limits of social change while portraying themselves as victims of an organised assault on liberty itself.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Many of those who attached their names to the letter are longstanding cultural arbiters, who, in the past, would only have had to fear the disapproval of their peers. Social media has burst their bubble and they now find that anyone with a Twitter account can challenge their opinions.
  • An open letter that is clearly decrying cancel culture (without naming it as such), signed by 150 academics and writers from all sides of the political spectrum, appeared this week in Harper’s Magazine. The signatories complained of a censoriousness that was stifling debate and called for arguments to be settled by persuasion rather than action.
  • the main thrust of their argument was a howl of anguish from a group that has suddenly found its views no longer treated with reverence.
  • The latest creation in their war against accountability is “cancel culture”, an ill-defined notion
  • The ability of middle-aged gatekeepers to control the agenda has been usurped by a new generation of activists who can spread information through their own networks, allowing them to challenge narratives promoted by the status quo.
  • The great progressive movements of the 21st century have sprung from these networks: Black Lives Matter; #MeToo; Extinction Rebellion. While they may seem disparate in their aims, what they have in common is a demand for accountability.
  • Although free speech remains the fundamental bedrock of a free society, for everyone to enjoy the benefits of freedom, liberty needs to be tempered by two further dimensions: equality and accountability
  • Without equality, those in power will use their freedom of expression to abuse and marginalise others. Without accountability, liberty can mutate into the most dangerous of all freedoms – impunity.
  • a new generation has risen that prioritises accountability over free speech. To those whose liberal ideals are proving no defence against the rising tide of duplicitous authoritarianism, this has come as a shock. But when reason, respect and responsibility are all under threat, accountability offers us a better foundation on which to build a cohesive society, one where everyone feels that their voice is heard
« First ‹ Previous 481 - 500 of 598 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page