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Opinion | The Elite Needs to Give Up Its G.D.P. Fetish - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • For Americans living through the recent months of crisis, some of the latest economic data may come as a surprise. Gross Domestic Product (G.D.P.) over the past six months remained far above what we could have achieved even a decade ago.
  • But rarely have such economic indicators been so entirely beside the point. Seriously: Who cares?
  • By Senator Toomey’s and Dr. Strain’s standards, the past few months were the greatest in human history to be alive. The pandemic has allowed more time than ever to enjoy air-conditioning and color televisions, computers and phones. One can joy ride for hours streaming podcasts.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The calamity we're now all living through offers the professional class an opportunity to reconsider assessments of the national condition issued so confidently pre-pandemic: Economists focus on material living standards partly for ease of quantification, but also because that is what free markets most reliably produce
  • But “material living standards,” measured in dollars of consumption (or inches of flat-screen TV), are not the same thing as “quality of life.” They say little about relationships, dignity, agency, or life satisfaction.
  • Ask yourself what matters to you right now. Consider whether new apps on your smartphone compensate for the loss of control, sense of powerlessness, and strain of unpredictability.
  • Speaking in March at the Heritage Foundation, Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican said, “many nuclear families are struggling, that families don’t have the community support that they once had, extended families live apart,” and “civil society” is in “decline.” Still, he argued, “the standard of living of middle-class and working class Americans has improved,” citing larger houses, better computers, and cars that are not only safer but also equipped with satellite radio and seat warmers.
  • Weighing these competing factors, he concluded, “For all the problems that we undoubtedly have, the fact is life is better today than it has ever been for the vast majority of the American people.”
  • What good does G.D.P. do, if people we love are falling seriously ill and dying in unprecedented numbers; if the rhythms of daily life vital to our happiness have gone haywire and our social connections have atrophied?
  • How much of that technology would you trade to erase the coronavirus? Put another way, how far back in history would you have to travel to find a time when Americans’ true quality of life was lower than today’s?
  • That this is even a question serves as damning refutation of Senator Toomey’s confidence that an improved standard of living more than compensates for weakened family bonds and waning community support.
  • While the right-of-center often dismisses working-class frustration with claims of economic prosperity, the left-of-center tends to dismiss their frustration as backward or racist.
  • America could slow, or partially reverse, elements of globalization that have most disrupted working-class lives, if that were our priority.
  • We could reorient our education system toward serving the majority of young people who still don’t earn even a community-college degree.
  • We could reform our system of organized labor to provide workers a genuine seat at the table and an institution in the community.
  • We could emphasize geography when we talk about diversity, aiming to distribute talent and investment more widely.
  • These are forms of social redistribution. The task is not to write a larger check but to relinquish power and realign institutions on behalf of those who have been left behind for decades.
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Is Capitalism Racist? | The New Yorker - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 24 May 20 - No Cached
  • “Capitalism and Slavery,” published in 1944 by Eric Williams, a young historian who later became the first Prime Minister of an independent Trinidad and Tobago. The book, which argued for the centrality of slavery to the rise of capitalism, was largely ignored for half a century; now its thesis is a starting point for a new generation of scholarship.
  • Large-scale Southern slaveholders are today understood as experts in such business practices as harsh, ever-increasing production quotas for workers and the creation of sophisticated credit instruments. Rather than representing an alternative system to industrial capitalism, American plantations enabled its development, providing the textile mills of Manchester and Birmingham with cotton to be spun into cloth by the new British working class
  • “There was no such thing as capitalism without slavery: the history of Manchester never happened without the history of Mississippi.”
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  • The new history of slavery seeks to obliterate the economic and moral distinction between slavery and capitalism, and between the South and the North, by showing them to have been all part of a single system
  • Critics of the new history of slavery chastise it for downplaying developments like Britain’s abolition of slavery in its colonies and the American Civil War, and for overstating slavery’s importance to the growth of the early American economy, even if the plantation was a particularly ruthless business enterprise.
  • The arguments about slavery imply larger arguments about America.
  • for some the national enterprise can still be seen as a slow and often interrupted progression toward a more just and democratic society; for others, it amounts to a set of variations on racial hierarchy and economic exploitation.
  • At least among respectable academic historians, the days of triumphant historical accounts of the greatness of the United States are long past.
  • Once slavery is positioned as the foundational institution of American capitalism, the country’s subsequent history can be depicted as an extension of this basic dynamic.
  • This is what Walter Johnson does in his new book, “The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States” (Basic)
  • Johnson’s guiding concept is “racial capitalism”: racism as a technique for exploiting black people and for fomenting the hostility of working-class whites toward blacks, so as to enable white capitalists to extract value from everyone else.
  • “The history of racial capitalism, it must be emphasized, is a history of wages as well as whips, of factories as well as plantations, of whiteness as well as blackness, of ‘freedom’ as well as slavery.”
  • For his purposes, St. Louis is a case study in the pervasiveness and the longevity of racism outside the formal boundaries of slavery.
  • A parade of men (most of them, in Johnson’s telling, closely connected to St. Louis) who were long presented to schoolchildren as the heroes of American history are revealed to be anything but.
  • “The Broken Heart of America” is a history populated by good guys and bad guys—many more of the latter.
  • Johnson doesn’t hesitate to use terms that didn’t exist at the time to describe the motivations of historical actors: “genocide,” “settler colonialism,” “ethnic cleansing”—terms given a honed edge by being relieved of historical specificity.
  • Johnson’s propensity for pasting condemnatory labels on his characters displays a concern that, without his firm guidance, readers may not draw the proper conclusions from the material he is presenting.
  • He is disinclined to describe any situation as ambiguous
  • In the craft of history, tendentiousness is an ever-present temptation; Johnson is as insistently moralizing in his way as previous generations of romantic, heroic historians of the West were in theirs
  • A story centered on a transhistorical force of oppression—spotlighting St. Louis as the capital of racial capitalism—offers an all-encompassing explanation but doesn’t leave much room for racism untethered from capitalism or capitalism untethered from racism
  • Johnson, impatient with such particularity, always goes both smaller, in the sense of depicting St. Louis as a fulcrum of history, and bigger, in the sense of making racial capitalism an eternal, all-powerful force, floating free of any specific time or place.
  • Other scholars have found different ways of explaining the same parlous present-day conditions in distressed black neighborhoods
  • Reading “The Broken Heart of America” inevitably prompts the question of how what’s broken might be repaired. Does a politically charged history come with a politics for the here and now?
  • Today, Johnson writes, “I have never been to a more amazing, hopeful place in my life.” Underlying his stated optimism is an implicit conviction that it wouldn’t do much good to look for help from the larger society; the victims of oppression must find a way forward by themselves.
  • deflating and deriding the progress it has made in the past and the promise it might hold for the future invites the hazards of defeatism. It distracts from the kinds of economic, educational, and criminal-justice reforms that mainstream progressives hope to enact. These are the tools we have at hand. It would be a shame not to use them
  • Javier E on 24 May 20
     
    A scholar depicts white supremacy as the economic engine of American history.
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Czar Nicholas II abdicates Russian throne - HISTORY - 0 views

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shared by brookegoodman on 31 May 20 - No Cached
  • During the February Revolution, Czar Nicholas II, ruler of Russia since 1894, is forced to abdicate the throne by the Petrograd insurgents, and a provincial government is installed in his place.
  • Nicholas soon retracted most of these concessions, and the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary groups won wide support.
  • In March 1917, the army garrison at Petrograd joined striking workers in demanding socialist reforms, and Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate.
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  • After a secret meeting, a death sentence was passed on the imperial family, and Nicholas, his wife, his children, and several of their servants were gunned down on the night of July 16.
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George Floyd Protests: First, Restore Order | National Review - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 02 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • oing evil in the service of a just cause does not change either side of the moral equation: Evil remains evil, and the just cause remains just — neither consideration cancels out the other or transmutes it.
  • police work involves violence, and there is no getting around that
  • Americans have for a long time understood this and made allowances for it, which is why a questionable police shooting is investigated in a way that is different from that of a questionable private act of self-defense.
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  • it is worth exploring the protections bad cops get from union rules, and the level of deference that prosecutors afford the police in questionable cases, among other things. It’s not true that the police are a racist, occupying force in American cities, but we have to be cognizant of the fact that they have lost the confidence of many of the communities they serve.
  • At the heart of the protests is the sense that the necessity of such reform is felt with an urgency in black America while white America thinks of it as a kind of desirable abstraction
  • It is notable that the police action leading to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis has not in itself produced a polarizing national disagreement: In fact, there has been broad agreement — broadly shared horror — across the political spectrum, because Americans are a generally decent and fair-minded people who are perfectly capable of understanding what they see with their own eyes, in this case a fellow American who died an unjust death at the hands of American police.
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Laura Loomer's GOP. - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Less than half of Republicans believe that COVID-19 is a major threat to public health. 63 percent of Republicans say that the extent of the coronavirus is exaggerated. A quarter of the public thinks that the pandemic is the result of a planned conspiracy.
  • 40 percent of Republicans say COVID-19 is no more deadly than the flu. 50 percent of Republicans say the COVID-19 death toll is an exaggeration. 23 percent of Republicans say masks should be worn "rarely" or "never."
  • Six QAnon believers have won Republican primaries this cycle. One of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has been warmly embraced by both Republican House leadership and President Trump. There's Donald Trump's victory in 2016 over a bevy of actual conservatives, including Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Perry. There's this little nugget of Republican primary preferences for 2024, where Donald Trump Jr. was in second place and polling at 17 percent. Which is—let's just be honest here—bonkers unless you view the party as a cult.
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  • Which brings us to Laura Loomer. She won the Republican primary for Florida-21 last night. Not in spite of being a crazy, but because she is a crazy.
  • Because if Republican voters want one thing, then all of the position papers and conferences coming out of Conservatism Inc. aren't going to convince them to choose another thing.
  • There are a couple problems with this view of the world. The biggest one is the voters.
  • There are a lot well-meaning conservatives and Republicans who believe that the aftermath of Trump will be a period of intellectual ferment and so they are committed to staying engaged with these two overlapping movements in order to be part of the reform, or tend to the green shoots, or whatever.
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Why Britain Failed Its Coronavirus Test - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...615166 uk pandemic failure response
shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Britain has not been alone in its failure to prevent mass casualties—almost every country on the Continent suffered appalling losses—but one cannot avoid the grim reality spelled out in the numbers: If almost all countries failed, then Britain failed more than most.
  • The raw figures are grim. Britain has the worst overall COVID-19 death toll in Europe, with more than 46,000 dead according to official figures, while also suffering the Continent’s second-worst “excess death” tally per capita, more than double that in France and eight times higher than Germany’s
  • The British government as a whole made poorer decisions, based on poorer advice, founded on poorer evidence, supplied by poorer testing, with the inevitable consequence that it achieved poorer results than almost any of its peers. It failed in its preparation, its diagnosis, and its treatment.
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  • In the past two decades, the list of British calamities, policy misjudgments, and forecasting failures has been eye-watering: the disaster of Iraq, the botched Libyan intervention in 2011, the near miss of Scottish independence in 2014, the woeful handling of Britain’s divorce from the European Union from 2016 onward
  • What emerges is a picture of a country whose systemic weaknesses were exposed with appalling brutality, a country that believed it was stronger than it was, and that paid the price for failures that have built up for years
  • The most difficult question about all this is also the simplest: Why?
  • Like much of the Western world, Britain had prepared for an influenza pandemic, whereas places that were hit early—Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan—had readied themselves for the type of respiratory illness that COVID-19 proved to be.
  • Britain’s pandemic story is not all bad. The NHS is almost universally seen as having risen to the challenge; the University of Oxford is leading the race to develop the first coronavirus vaccine for international distribution, backed with timely and significant government cash; new hospitals were built and treatments discovered with extraordinary speed; the welfare system did not collapse, despite the enormous pressure it suddenly faced; and a national economic safety net was rolled out quickly.
  • One influential U.K. government official told me that although individual mistakes always happen in a fast-moving crisis, and had clearly taken place in Britain’s response to COVID-19, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that Britain was simply not ready. As Ian Boyd, a professor and member of SAGE, put it: “The reality is, there has been a major systemic failure.”
  • “It’s obvious that the British state was not prepared for” the pandemic, this official told me. “But, even worse, many parts of the state thought they were prepared, which is significantly more dangerous.”
  • When the crisis came, too much of Britain’s core infrastructure simply failed, according to senior officials and experts involved in the pandemic response
  • The human immune system actually has two parts. There is, as Cummings correctly identifies, the adaptive part. But there is also an innate part, preprogrammed as the first line of defense against infectious disease. Humans need both. The same is true of a state and its government, said those I spoke with—many of whom were sympathetic to Cummings’s diagnosis. Without a functioning structure, the responsive antibodies of the government and its agencies cannot learn on the job. When the pandemic hit, both parts of Britain’s immune system were found wanting.
  • The consequences may be serious and long term, but the most immediately tragic effect was that creating space in hospitals appears to have been prioritized over shielding Britain’s elderly, many of whom were moved to care homes, part of what Britain calls the social-care sector, where the disease then spread. Some 25,000 patients were discharged into these care homes between March 17 and April 16, many without a requirement that they secure a negative coronavirus test beforehand.
  • There was a bit too much exceptionalism about how brilliant British science was at the start of this outbreak, which ended up with a blind spot about what was happening in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, where we just weren’t looking closely enough, and they turned out to be the best in the world at tackling the coronavirus,” a former British cabinet minister told me.
  • The focus on influenza pandemics and the lack of a tracing system were compounded by a shortfall in testing capacity.
  • Johnson’s strategy throughout was one that his hero Winston Churchill raged against during the First World War, when he concluded that generals had been given too much power by politicians. In the Second World War, Churchill, by then prime minister and defense secretary, argued that “at the summit, true politics and strategy are one.” Johnson did not take this approach, succumbing—as his detractors would have it—to fatalistic management rather than bold leadership, empowering the generals rather than taking responsibility himself
  • “It was a mixture of poor advice and fatalism on behalf of the experts,” one former colleague of Johnson’s told me, “and complacency and boosterism on behalf of the PM.”
  • What it all adds up to, then, is a sobering reality: Institutional weaknesses of state capacity and advice were not corrected by political judgment, and political weaknesses were not corrected by institutional strength. The system was hardwired for a crisis that did not come, and could not adapt quickly enough to the one that did.
  • Britain’s NHS has come to represent the country itself, its sense of identity and what it stands for. Set up in 1948, it became known as the first universal health-care system of any major country in the world (although in reality New Zealand got there first). Its creation, three years after victory in the Second World War, was a high-water mark in the country’s power and prestige—a time when it was a global leader, an exception.
  • Every developed country in the world, apart from the United States, has a universal health-care system, many of which produce better results than the NHS.
  • When the pandemic hit, then, Britain was not the strong, successful, resilient country it imagined, but a poorly governed and fragile one. The truth is, Britain was sick before it caught the coronavirus.
  • In asking the country to rally to the NHS’s defense, Johnson was triggering its sense of self, its sense of pride and national unity—its sense of exceptionalism.
  • Before the coronavirus, the NHS was already under considerable financial pressure. Waiting times for appointments were rising, and the country had one of the lowest levels of spare intensive-care capacity in Europe. In 2017, Simon Stevens, the NHS’s chief executive, compared the situation to the time of the health sevice’s founding decades prior: an “economy in disarray, the end of empire, a nation negotiating its place in the world.”
  • Yet from its beginnings, the NHS has occupied a unique hold on British life. It is routinely among the most trusted institutions in the country. Its key tenet—that all Britons will have access to health care, free at the point of service—symbolizes an aspirational egalitarianism that, even as inequality has risen since the Margaret Thatcher era, remains at the core of British identity.
  • In effect, Britain was rigorously building capacity to help the NHS cope, but releasing potentially infected elderly, and vulnerable, patients in the process. By late June, more than 19,000 people had died in care homes from COVID-19. Separate excess-death data suggest that the figure may be considerably higher
  • Britain failed to foresee the dangers of such an extraordinary rush to create hospital capacity, a shift that was necessary only because of years of underfunding and decades of missed opportunities to bridge the divide between the NHS and retirement homes, which other countries, such as Germany, had found the political will to do.
  • Ultimately, the scandal is a consequence of a political culture that has proved unable to confront and address long-term problems, even when they are well known.
  • other health systems, such as Germany’s, which is better funded and decentralized, performed better than Britain’s. Those I spoke with who either are in Germany or know about Germany’s success told me there was an element of luck about the disparity with Britain. Germany had a greater industrial base to produce medical testing and personal protective equipment, and those who returned to Germany with the virus from abroad were often younger and healthier, meaning the initial strain on its health system was less.
  • However, this overlooks core structural issues—resulting from political choices in each country—that meant that Germany proved more resilient when the crisis came, whether because of the funding formula for its health system, which allows individuals more latitude to top up their coverage with private contributions, or its decentralized nature, which meant that separate regions and hospitals were better able to respond to local outbreaks and build their own testing network.
  • Also unlike Britain, which has ducked the problem of reforming elderly care, Germany created a system in 1995 that everyone pays into, avoids catastrophic costs, and has cross-party support.
  • A second, related revelation of the crisis—which also exposed the failure of the British state—is that underneath the apparent simplicity of the NHS’s single national model lies an engine of bewildering complexity, whose lines of responsibility, control, and accountability are unintelligible to voters and even to most politicians.
  • Britain, I was told, has found a way to be simultaneously overcentralized and weak at its center. The pandemic revealed the British state’s inability to manage the nation’s health:
  • Since at least the 1970s, growing inequality between comparatively rich southeast England (including London) and the rest of the country has spurred all parties to pledge to “rebalance the economy” and make it less reliant on the capital. Yet large parts remain poorer than the European average. According to official EU figures, Britain has five regions with a per capita gross domestic product of less than $25,000. France, Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden have none
  • If Britain were part of the United States, it would be anywhere from the third- to the eighth-poorest state, depending on the measure.
  • Britain’s performance in this crisis has been so bad, it is damaging the country’s reputation, both at home and abroad.
  • Inside Downing Street, officials believe that the lessons of the pandemic apply far beyond the immediate confines of elderly care and coronavirus testing, taking in Britain’s long-term economic failures and general governance, as well as what they regard as its ineffective foreign policy and diplomacy.
  • the scale of the task itself is enormous. “We need a complete revamp of our government structure because it’s not fit for purpose anymore,” Boyd told me. “I just don’t know if we really understand our weakness.”
  • In practice, does Johnson have the confidence to match his diagnosis of Britain’s ills, given the timidity of his approach during the pandemic? The nagging worry among even Johnson’s supporters in Parliament is that although he may campaign as a Ronald Reagan, he might govern as a Silvio Berlusconi, failing to solve the structural problems he has identified.
  • This is not a story of pessimistic fatalism, of inevitable decline. Britain was able to partially reverse a previous slump in the 1980s, and Germany, seen as a European laggard in the ‘90s, is now the West’s obvious success story. One of the strengths of the Westminster parliamentary system is that it occasionally produces governments—like Johnson’s—with real power to effect change, should they try to enact it.
  • It has been overtaken by many of its rivals, whether in terms of health provision or economic resilience, but does not seem to realize it. And once the pandemic passes, the problems Britain faces will remain: how to sustain institutions so that they bind the country together, not pull it apart; how to remain prosperous in the 21st century’s globalized economy; how to promote its interests and values; how to pay for the ever-increasing costs of an aging population.
  • “The really important question,” Boyd said, “is whether the state, in its current form, is structurally capable of delivering on the big-picture items that are coming, whether pandemics or climate change or anything else.”
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The Nuts of August - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Meanwhile, the Republican-run Senate Intelligence Committee released a nearly 1,000 page long report documenting the extent of the Trump campaign's connections with Russia. It is remarkable because it is a bipartisan report and many of the details are new.
  • The report strongly suggests that Trump lied to the special prosecutors about his Wikileaks conversations with Roger Stone, and lays out "an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin officials and other Russians, including at least one intelligence officer and others tied to the country’s spy services."  The report includes this dazzling detail:
  • Kremlin-directed operatives opened champagne when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016... “We uncorked a tiny bottle of champagne ... took one gulp each and looked into each other’s eyes .... We uttered almost in unison: ‘We made America great,’” one operative at the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency said in the message obtained by the Republican-led committee.
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  • None of this is likely to make much difference, since everyone is already locked in on Russiagate, but it reminds us of a central reality of 2020: We know who Donald Trump is.
  • Trump's biggest scandals -- his fawning servility to Russia, his attempts to blackmail the Ukrainians into helping his campaign, his relentless self-enrichment schemes --- have all played out in real-time for everyone to see. I can't remember who said it, but with Trump there may be some secrets left, but there are no mysteries.
  • I think this goes to the heart of the differences between Never Trump and the anti-anti-Trumpers. The question is how to think of Trump: as a somewhat unsavory conservative with ghastly manners, or as someone who is fundamentally dangerous -- and therefore off the normal axis of right/ left politics
  • Under intense pressure, Trump's postmaster general seems to be backing down from his plans to "reform" the postal service before the election. But a lot of damage has already been done, especially to the public's confidence in mail-in voting, which may have been the point all along. 
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Can America's Middle Class Be Saved from a New Depression? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lwaukee-unemployment-jobs.html great depression great recession welfare government spending middle-class history culture politics
shared by Javier E on 30 May 20 - No Cached
  • In 2016 the Pew Research Center released a study that examined 229 metropolitan areas across the country: In 203, the share of adults living in middle-­income households declined from 2000 to 2014, while the share of adults living in lower- and upper-income homes each rose in more than 150 areas.
  • At the same time, the cost of minivans, homes, health care and college tuition has increased. Families reacted to this new reality by plunging themselves into debt and neglecting to save,
  • in America, you become middle-class by consuming: If you cannot afford a home in a respectable school district, a pet, summer vacations and so on, you have not ‘‘made it.’’ Despite their outward trappings of prosperity — and often because of them — many middle-class families have negligible savings and too much debt.
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  • But the American middle class is neither stable nor self-reliant. Recognizing this is the prerequisite to determining what we need to weather this storm.
  • The American middle class long has been presented as evidence that self-reliance leads to stability, even prosperity. The very existence of a middle class appears to prove the notion that if we work hard enough and make the right choices, everything will be OK — and also its corollary: that the poor must have somehow brought poverty upon themselves and that we, industrious workers that we are, will surely never be one of them
  • Before the pandemic, Americans saved approximately 8 percent of their income, which would cover a fraction of their living expenses. American households carry an average of $111,198 in debt. Even in flush times, this kind of financial exposure can be stressful. During long spells of unemployment and underemployment, it can lead to ruin.
  • virtually every American has benefited from some form of public aid, from programs widely recognized as ‘‘welfare,’’ like food stamps, to more hidden subsidies issued through the tax code, like government-subsidized retirement benefits
  • the average middle-class American family (with a before-tax household income of $66,400) receives more help from the government than it pays in federal taxes and collects more aid than the average American family in the lowest income quintile (with a before-tax household income of $24,600).
  • We’re all on the dole, however meager it may be.
  • countries with more robust welfare states have been able to respond to the recent economic downturn with a high level of competence and the kind of deep investment that the Covid-19 pandemic demands.
  • In nations like Britain and Germany, workers have been allowed to keep their jobs even as businesses shuttered because their governments are paying all or most of their wages.
  • Because Germany already had a system, known as Kurzarbeit, in place to pay workers whose hours are reduced during economic crises, it didn’t need to reinvent the wheel when the coronavirus began to spread. Other countries that didn’t have such a system in place, including Ireland and Denmark, quickly fashioned one.
  • it’s not just the design of a nation’s welfare infrastructure that matters but also its level of commitment to protecting basic human needs.
  • just as states go to war with the army they have, in a recession they tend to catch the unemployed with the safety net they have
  • America not only lacks many programs that buffer workers from economic calamity — such as the right to housing or universal health care — it is also bereft of a national culture characterized by social solidarity and faith in government.
  • About a third of Americans express trust in the government, unlike most Germans, Norwegians and Swiss.
  • countries that have been able to bend the curve of Covid-19 cases, both in Europe (Switzerland, France) and Asia (South Korea, Taiwan), have been those where citizens recognize the importance of strong government.
  • Countries that have yet to respond as effectively — including Brazil, the United Kingdom and the United States — have publics deeply skeptical of their governments as well as current heads of state (Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump) who share, and stoke, that sentiment.
  • ‘‘The American public consistently expresses a desire for more government effort and higher levels of spending for almost every aspect of the welfare state,’’
  • The New Deal erected an institutional scaffolding designed to provide unprecedented stability and predictability for the American economy,’
  • The quarter century of prosperity that followed World War II was rooted in the profound structural reforms of the New Deal. A strong market was made possible by strong government intervention.
  • It is now widely acknowledged that the federal government should have acted sooner and spent bigger when addressing the 2008 financial crisis. In March, Neel Kashkari, who oversaw the rescue package (the Troubled Asset Relief Program) and is now president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, wrote, ‘‘My experience underscores that if there is a principle policymakers need to keep in mind going forward, it’s this: Err on the side of helping as many workers and businesses as possible rather than on prudence.’’
  • In 2008, the government hobbled the rescue package by trying to make sure that only ‘‘deserving’’ Americans received help, slowing and narrowing relief. ‘‘The American people ultimately paid more because of our attempts to save them money,’’ Kashkari wrote with hindsight.
  • ‘‘Adding $3 trillion in spending,’’ as the HEROES Act would, ‘‘is necessary for spending after the summer and most importantly to start helping states.’’ J. W. Mason, an associate professor of economics at John Jay College in New York, pointed out that $3 trillion corresponds to a 20 percent decline in private demand, which, based on what happened in the 2008 recession, we should prepare for.
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Trump's GOP is Increasingly Racist and Authoritarian-and Here to Stay - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/authoritarian-and-here-to-stay trump gop analysis 2020 election trumpism
shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • he inflicted on us a presidency which was ignorant, cruel, reckless, lawless, divisive, and disloyal.
  • Mendacity and bigotry became the mode of communication between America’s president and his party’s base.
  • Not only did he worsen a deadly pandemic—by immersing an angry and alienated minority in his alternate reality, he is sickening our future.
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  • He rose from a political party bent on thwarting demographic change by subverting the democratic process; a party whose base was addicted to white identity politics, steeped in religious fundamentalism, and suffused with authoritarian cravings—a party which, infected by Trumpism, now spreads the multiple malignancies metastasized by Trump’s personal and political pathologies.
  • Since the civil rights revolution triggered an influx of resentful Southern whites, the GOP has catered to white grievance and anxiety.
  • Trump’s transformative contribution has been to make racial antagonism overt—a badge of pride that bonds him to his followers in opposition to a pluralist democracy that threatens their imperiled social and political hegemony.
  • Take the poll released last week by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) measuring the attitudes of “Fox News Republicans”—the 40 percent of party adherents who trust Fox as their primary source of TV news. The survey found that 91 percent oppose the Black Lives Matter movement; 90 percent believe that police killings of blacks are “isolated incidents”; and 58 think that whites are victimized by racial discrimination, compared to 36 percent who think blacks are.
  • He comprehends his audience all too well
  • Their animus toward immigration is equally strong. Substantial majorities believe that immigrants consume a disproportionate amount of governmental services, increase crime in local communities, and threaten our cultural and ethnic character.
  • That sense of racial and cultural besiegement pervades the 73 percent of Fox News Republicans who, the survey found, believe that white Christians suffer from “a lot” of societal discrimination—more than double the number who say that blacks do
  • Another key subgroup of the GOP base, white evangelicals, harbors similar attitudes. The poll found that the majority adamantly disbelieve that the legacy of racial discrimination makes it difficult for African Americans to succeed
  • The head of the PRRI, Robert P. Jones, concludes that Trump arouses white Christians “not despite, but through appeals to white supremacy” based on evoking “powerful fears about the loss of White Christian dominance.”
  • In 2016, Vox reports, Trump carried whites by 54 to 39 percent; in 2020, by 57 to 42 percent (per the raw exit polls)
  • Tucker Carlson serves as a cautionary tale. When Carlson dismissed, as gently as possible, the crackpot allegations of Trump lawyer Sidney Powell about a sweeping conspiracy using rogue voting machines, he was savaged across the right-wing echo chamber as a spineless quisling. Lesson learned.
  • fear of displacement helps explain the profound emotional connection between Trump and Republican voters. Their loyalty is not to the political philosophy traditionally embraced by the GOP, but a visceral sense of racial, religious, and cultural identity—and the need to preserve it—which is instinctively authoritarian and anti-democratic.
  • Bartels surveyed respondents regarding four statements which, taken together, read like a blueprint for Trump: The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it. A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands. Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done. It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.
  • Reports Bump: “Most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed with the first statement. . . . Nearly three-quarters agreed that election results should be treated with skepticism.” Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were also “significantly more likely to say they agreed with the other two statements than that they disagreed.”
  • This lies at the heart of Trump’s appeal: his shared sense of victimization by an insidious elite; his unvarnished denunciation of white America’s supposed enemies; and his promise to keep them at bay—if necessary, by force. For many in the Republican base, he fulfills a psychic longing for an American strongman.
  • In the New York Times, Katherine Stewart describes the growth of “a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world.”
  • “Christian nationalism is a creation of a uniquely isolated messaging sphere. Many members of the rank and file get their main political information not just from messaging platforms that keep their audiences in a world that is divorced from reality, but also from dedicated religious networks and reactionary faith leaders.”
  • As Republican strategists well appreciate, a party whose appeal is confined to conservative whites is, over the demographic long term, doomed to defeat. The GOP’s design is to postpone as long as possible their electoral day of reckoning.
  • In launching his naked attempt to disenfranchise the majority of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin through assertions of fraud unprecedented in their speciousness and scope, Trump took the GOP’s distaste for free and fair elections to its logical conclusion: the abrogation of American democracy at the highest level.
  • Trump justified his anti-democratic sociopathy by proliferating a plethora of groundless and preposterous falsehoods calculated to delegitimize our electoral processes. He claimed that millions of phony mail-in ballots had been cast for Biden; that voting machines had been re-engineered to exclude millions more cast for him; and that Republican election observers had been excluded from many polling places by a host of local officials bent on serving a labyrinthine conspiracy to purloin the White House.
  • Never once did he or his lawyers cite a shred of evidence supporting any material impropriety. Rather his purpose was to convince the Republican base that they were being cheated of their leader by the insidious “other.” Numerous polls confirm that it’s working; typical is a Politico/Morning Consult survey showing that 70 percent of Republicans don’t believe the election was fairly conducted.
  • As Trevor Potter, a Republican who formerly headed the Federal Election Commission, told the New York Times, Trump “is creating a road map to destabilization and chaos in future years. . . . What he’s saying, explicitly, is if a party doesn’t like the election result they have the right to change it by gaming the system.”
  • Support for Trump’s wall is nearly unanimous (96 percent); two-thirds (66 percent) favor barring refugees from entering the United States; and a majority (53 percent) support separating children from their parents when a family enters the country without permission.
  • Ultimately, this otherworldly obduracy stems from Trump’s manifest psychological illness: his imperishable narcissism; his ineradicable drive to be noticed; his relentless need to dominate; his comprehensive carelessness of all considerations save what pleases him in the moment. Television turned this moral pygmy into a mythic figure—and he cannot let go.
  • Republican elites want very much to turn the page on Donald Trump following his loss. But . . . they do not have any say in the matter, because their party now belongs to him. And the party belongs to Donald Trump because he has delivered to Republican voters exactly what they want.
  • a notable phenomenon of Trump’s presidency is the degree to which financially embattled working-class whites imagined, contrary to observable reality, that their economic situation had improved—or soon would. There are few better examples of how politics mirrors psychology more than lived experience.
  • This fidelity is why some Republican gurus remain committed to Trump’s strategy of maximizing support among middle-class and blue-collar whites. After all, they argue, despite Trump’s defeat the GOP did better than expected in senatorial and congressional races. Why risk tinkering with his formula?
  • Finally, economic populism is antithetical to the donor classes who, in truth, did better under Trump than did anyone else. They got their tax cuts and their judges—the GOP’s pipeline for judicial nominees, the Federalist Society, is dedicated to advancing pro-corporate jurisprudence. This is not the prescription for worker-friendly policies.
  • For the foreseeable future, Trumpism will define the GOP. The path to regeneration runs not through reform but, one fears, must proceed from self-destruction. The wait time will be painful for the party, and fateful for the country.
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Opinion | Forget half-baked punditry. Watch a historic shift. - The Washington Post - 0 views

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  • After yet another election in which polling proved wildly misleading in multiple ways (e.g., the popular-vote margin for president, the direction of the House, the fate of the Senate Republicans), pundits return to the most unreliable of polls — exit polls — to pontificate on what had transpired. They might as well use a Magic 8 ball to discern the mysteries of the 2020 election.
  • The media should have a modicum of self-awareness. At the very least, they ought to acknowledge that billions of pixels and months of political chatter did not inform the public; if anything, they misled voters about President Trump’s level of support and wasted the opportunity to inform voters about the variety and seriousness of the challenges we will face in 2021.
  • We have gone from staffing top jobs with T-ball players to recruiting major league veterans. The former proved to be a disaster; but the big-leaguers have yet to prove themselves.
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  • Instead of using flawed and incomplete information to discover what happened, the political and media class should turn away from Trump and from horserace politics. We face unique and daunting challenges. We can witness as great a shift in presidents as we have seen since Herbert Hoover passed the baton to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
  • The shift in the quality of the executive branch raises a host of interesting questions:
  • Can Biden rebuild an executive branch that Trump demoralized and hollowed out?Can governance based on the best available facts produce results?
  • Can Biden prove centrist government is alive and well — and can win over voters?Can Biden seize an opportunity when more Americans are sensitized to issues of racial justice to make significant reforms and create a new spirit of reconciliation?
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NATO must focus more on challenge of rising China, report to say | Reuters - 0 views

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  • NATO must think harder about how to handle China and its military rise, though Russia will remain its main adversary during this decade, according to a report to be published on Tuesday on reforming the Atlantic alliance.
  • “China is no longer the benign trading partner that the West had hoped for. It is the rising power of our century and NATO must adapt
  • Part of NATO’s response should be maintaining a technological advantage over China, protecting computer networks and infrastructure
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  • forge closer ties with non-NATO countries such as Australia
  • deterrence in space
  • China is investing massively in new weapons. It is coming closer to us, from the Arctic to Africa. China does not share our values ... and tries to intimidate other countries
  • NATO should consider including China in NATO’s official master strategy document, its “Strategic Concept”
  • Even as U.S. President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ era comes to an end and Europeans welcome the election of an Atlanticist president-elect in Joe Biden, tensions over NATO’s ability to act remain.
  • From anger over Turkey’s decision to buy a Russian weapons system to U.S. doubts over Europe’s commitment to its own defence, NATO - founded in 1949 to contain a military threat from the Soviet Union - has also faced calls from Trump to do more in the Middle East.
  • However, Eastern European allies, fearful of Russia since Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, are concerned about shifting too many resources away from NATO’s core task of defending Europe.
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Opinion | Republicans and Democrats Need to Work Together. Earmarks Can Help. - The New... - 0 views

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  • Lawmakers now have a duty to hunker down and find ways to make progress on critical issues. But with both chambers of Congress narrowly divided and ideologically polarized, coming together on even the most modest deals could prove daunting.
  • One promising move under consideration: bringing back congressional earmarks.
  • Loosely speaking, earmarks are spending requests — or, depending on your definition, also limited tax or tariff benefits — inserted into bills at the behest of individual lawmakers for the benefit of specific entities in specific locations.
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  • In the big picture, earmarks add up to little more than a rounding error, generally constituting not more than 1 percent of the federal budget. They are used to determine spending priorities, not spending levels, meaning they determine how the pie gets divided rather than how big it is.
  • As conceived, earmarks allow the people who presumably best understand a state or district — its elected officials — to direct federal dollars to where they are most needed.
  • In 2011, Republicans assumed control of the chamber and went even further, declaring a moratorium on earmarks.
  • In 2007, the Democratic-controlled House began reforming the practice, increasing transparency and accountability.
  • This ban has made Congress less accountable and more dysfunctional. It is time to abandon the experiment.
  • Since America’s earliest days, they have proved a useful tool for building coalitions. (The first known instance of congressional earmarking dates to the Lighthouse Act of 1789.)
  • Considering the thicket of crises the nation is facing, big-ticket legislation, including another meaty round of coronavirus relief, is precisely what is needed.
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A Hard Reckoning for the Democrats: Race, Class and Joe Biden's Election - The Globalist - 0 views

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  • The disappointing election results also raise doubts about a widespread belief among Democrats that they are on the side of history because the population of non-whites — who tend to vote for Democrats — is growing faster than the population of whites. Therefore, many Democratic leaders have assumed that they do not have to worry about losing white working class voters to the Republicans because whites will be less important in the future.
  • First, the often-cited numbers are misleading in and of themselves. The well-known New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently wrote: “sometime in the 2040s, whites will make up 49% of the U.S. population, and Latinos, Blacks, Asians and multiracial populations 51%.”
  • But Friedman, like many other political analysts, errs when he classifies the largest minority subgroup, Latin-Americans, as “not white.” In fact, at least 65% consider themselves racially “only” white. Thus, if Latino-Americans are correctly classified (by their self-identification), whites will still make up 69% of the U.S. population by 2060. So, if racial identity really determines voting behavior, then U.S. politics will be dominated by white people for a long time.
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  • Second, the assumption that people will vote as a bloc according to their ethnic or racial identity is simplistic.
  • despite Trump’s xenophobia and racism, a larger share of Latinos and black men voted for him this year than they did in 2016.
  • Democrats also lost Texas again. During the campaign, the Democrats had targeted their appeal to Latinos by emphasizing Trump’s mistreatment of immigrants entering illegally from Mexico and Central America. But Mexican-Americans along the border supported Donald Trump because their jobs and wages are being undercut by the newer immigrants.
  • Republicans of course have been the major promoters of policies that have beneftted investors at the expense of workers. But, shamelessly and cleverly, they have diverted white working class anger toward minorities, protecting the country’s elites.
  • The Republicans’ trap for the Democrats White skin is still privileged in the United States of America and the Republican Party has increasingly pandered to racism. Democrats, for both moral and political reasons, must strongly support racial justice.
  • But in an overwhelmingly white society, they cannot attract the necessary sustained political support with a message focused on generalized white guilt.
  • Thus, for example, a majority of whites supported the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality towards Blacks. But the support dropped sharply when demands rose for whites to pay reparations for past oppression of Blacks.
  • National polls showed that Latino-American voters thought jobs and health care, not immigration, were the most important issues for them.
  • After all, several decades of stagnant wages, precarious employment and the erosion of upward mobility have left most whites in the United States today who must work for a living no longer feeling very “privileged.
  • Economic class trumps racial affiliation Most Latinos and black Americans are working class — like the majority of whites. And the data shows the economic problems of minorities are now more likely a function of their class than their race or ethnicity.
  • Thus, the central issue of income and wealth inequality is not the privilege of “whites” any longer. Rather, it is the privilege of “rich whites.
  • As economist Adolph Reed, an African American, puts it: If you say to those white people in the bottom 50% (i.e., people who have basically no wealth at all) that the basic inequality in the United States is between black and white, they know you are wrong. More tellingly, if you say the same thing to the black people in the bottom 50% (i.e., people who have even less than no wealth at all), they also know you are wrong. It’s not all the white people who have the money; it’s the top 10% of (mainly) whites.
  • An engine of inequality Thomas Piketty and others have shown that modern capitalism has become an engine for the expansion of inequality between capital and labor. Thus, in the absence of substantial reform, incomes and opportunities for most working Americans — whatever the color of their skin — will continue to shrink.
  • Trump succeeded in part because large numbers of white working people felt abandoned by Democrats. Over the last few decades, the Democratic Party’s establishment forged an alliance with Wall Street financiers who are liberal on social issues — such as racial discrimination, immigration and abortion — but very conservative on economics.
  • One bizarre result was that throughout the campaign, voters saw the plutocrat Trump as better at creating jobs and prosperity than Biden.
  • Have Democrats really learned the lesson? Biden’s less elitist style helped him with enough white workers to win three key Midwestern states that Hillary Clinton had lost. Still, had Donald Trump shown a minimum of competence in responding to the COVID 19 crisis, he could well have been re-elected.
  • Republicans forcing the Democrats’ hands Because Republicans will do everything they can to make the Biden presidency a failure, the Democrats’ disparate factions have to unite behind him in a “popular front” against the authoritarian right. This may be hard for many on the Party’s left, but they have no choice. If Biden fails, they fail.
  • Conclusion The election gave us some clues to where U.S. democracy might be headed, but the question remains unanswered: Can Biden and the Democrats restore enough security and prosperity to the American working class to finally eradicate the neofascist political pandemic?
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Saudi Arabia urged to release women's rights activists by European envoys - CNN - 0 views

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  • Seven European human rights ambassadors criticized Saudi Arabia on Sunday over the continued detention of at least five women's rights activists
  • Hathloul appeared in a Saudi court on Wednesday, as her trial was scheduled to start after 900 days in pre-trial detention.
  • The case of another women's rights activist, Samar Badawi, has also been referred to the special court
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  • "We remain deeply concerned by the continued detention of at least five women's right activists in Saudi Arabia. We regret that the cases of Loujain Al-Hathloul and Samar Badawi have now been referred to the Special Criminal Court for terrorism and national security cases," human rights ambassadors for the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Estonia, Luxembourg and Finland said in a statement.
  • "We join the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Special Rapporteurs and Treaty Bodies in reiterating our call for the release of all political detainees, including the women's rights activists."CNN has reached out to the Saudi government for a response. 
  • The court she appeared in on Wednesday said it would investigate Hathloul's allegations of torture in prison, according to the family's statement
  • "Peaceful activism, and advocating for women's rights is not a crime. Human rights defenders can be a strong partner for governments in addressing concerns within society," the ambassadors said.
  • Hathloul, 31, was jailed in May 2018 during a sweep that targeted prominent opponents of the kingdom's former law barring women from driving.
  • "This is yet another sign that Saudi Arabia's claims of reform on human rights are a farce," Maalouf said. 
  • Chairman of US House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff called on Saturday for Hathloul's immediate release, saying on Twitter she had "endured torture and abuse for over 2 years while detained." 
  • the US Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs said it was "concerned" by reports that the cases of Hathloul and Badawi had been transferred to the terrorism court. 
  • "Activism on behalf of (women's) rights is not a crime. Also troubled by allegations of abuse against them & a lack of transparency/access to the trials," the bureau's press office wrote on Twitter. 
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Rise of a paranoid superpower: Xi Jinping's China is making costly strategic blunders i... - 0 views

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  • In the rise of China, we might be witnessing the emergence of a paranoid superpower. It is increasingly clear that paranoia — both as an internal disorder and a trigger for (exaggerated) external threat perception — is driving China’s grand strategy.
  • The CPC is obsessed with avoiding the mistakes that brought about the downfall of USSR
  • Supreme leader Xi and a generation of party leaders have minutely studied, learnt and internalised lessons from Soviet Russia’s collapse that ranged from blaming Mikhail Gorbachev’s twin reform gambits of glasnost and perestroika to noting the mistakes made by a corrupted, bloated and incompetent Soviet Communist Party that failed to tighten political control and mitigate the challenges thrown by the rise of nationalist impulses in areas under USSR from Ukraine to Azerbaijan
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  • The USSR crumbled — or so goes the lesson — because it became open, loosened its grip over politics and polity.
  • This idea has now received official stamp from the very top of Beijing’s leadership, and one can see it reverberating through the new wave of paranoia about foreign influence, reassertion of party power, and hostility to civil society
  • The Soviet fall, once seen at least in part as a result of the Communist Party’s own failings, has become reinterpreted as a deliberate US plot and a moral failure to hold the line against Western influence,” writes Palmer.
  • This paranoia guides and informs every step that Xi takes, be it the brutal repression of Uighur minority, the annihilation of their Muslim identity or the purge of his political opponents under the pretext of corruption.
  • Xi wrote in 2017: “As the world’s largest party, no external force can defeat us, and only we can defeat ourselves… We should stay alert to the ubiquitous factors that could weaken our Party’s pioneering nature and contaminate our Party’s purity… If we don’t take strict precautions and correct them in time… small problems will grow into big ones, minor slips will escalate into an irreversible landslide, probably even leading to a broader and subversive catastrophe.”
  • Xi and the CPC remain convinced that the US wants to balance and contain its rise, constrict it by fanning pro-democracy sentiments and challenge the ‘One China’ policy
  • Beijing’s actions are swayed by insecurity based on that fear. China blames the US for “influencing” the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, accuses Washington of instigating and sponsoring Taiwan’s defiance, and it has noted with concern American (mostly botched) efforts at regime change in post-second World War history
  • This has heightened Xi’s (and the party’s fears) to the extent that China believes a proactive, interventionist, in-your-face foreign policy — driven by a revanchist obsession with reassembling the Middle Kingdom’s imperial empire over the land and sea through military and non-military means — along with the relentless accumulation of economic and hard power are prerequisite to achieving the China Dream.
  • In keeping the party and the society focused on achieving that goal, fear (whether real or imagined) is a useful tool.
  • The CPC needs the west and its political system as the ‘other’ to operate in opposition to it, and paranoia remains the overwhelming driving force that binds the party, the state and society
  • in the last six months alone of the new decade — and amid a raging, global pandemic that originated in Wuhan — Xi’s China has undertaken a series of coercive steps and has gone into geopolitical jousting with almost all its neighbours and regional actors. The goal of a regional hegemon and a presumptive superpower should be creating conditions that aid its rise, not cause impediments in the path through abrasive overreach.
  • This naked bullying behaviour has consequences, even though China may like to believe that the ability of these regional actors in balancing against China is constrained by their economic dependence on Beijing. China has alienated regional players and given rise to a renewed push for Asian multilateralism underwritten by the US.
  • As former Indian ambassador to China Gautam Bambawale has said, for a minor tactical gain on the ground, China has “lost India” and forced New Delhi into fundamentally reassessing its China policy.
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Can We Stop America's Free Fall? - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/can-we-stop-americas-free-fall what is to be done america agenda US crisis culture politics policy
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  • The daunting path to renewal.
  • The indispensable prerequisite for restoration is the defeat of Donald Trump. Only then can we give ordinary Americans the security that undergirds a stable democracy: quality healthcare; economic and racial justice; universal childcare; decent public schools; affordable higher education; internet access; and fair wages.
  • Further, we need a lasting commitment to combating climate change; protecting the environment; renewing our infrastructure; and crafting an immigration system which reflects our better self
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  • “For change to endure,” George Packer writes, “for national shame to become pride, we need a radical agenda with a patriotic spirit. We have to revive the one thing that has ever held together this sprawling, multiplicitous country: democratic faith.”
  • That requires sweeping reform of our sclerotic institutions, and the popular will to do it. But a majority of Americans generally believe that we need significant changes in how our government functions.
  • Here are some essentials: Protecting voting rights. Achieving a multistate compact to conform the Electoral College to the popular will. Establishing term limits for Supreme Court justices. Abrogating the filibuster. Instituting bipartisan commissions to design legislative districts. Curbing money in politics. Passing strict ethics requirements for public officials.
  • That is daunting, perhaps impossible, agenda. But it’s the only way our failing democracy can hope to reclaim our collective faith. Writes Packer: “The experience of a competent, active government bringing opportunity and justice to Americans left behind by globalization would inject an antivenom into the country’s bloodstream.”
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Trump Tests Positive for Coronavirus: This Week in the 2020 Race - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • Trump Tests Positive for Coronavirus
  • a coronavirus diagnosis for President Trump that has thrown the White House and the November presidential race into flux.
  • 49.5 million over the past week, more than double what the Trump campaign spent — about $21.3 million — according to Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking firm.
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  • oe Biden by at least five percentage points
  • Melania Trump, the first lady, said that they had tested positive for the coronavirus, throwing the White House and the presidential race into upheaval.
  • Here how the diagnosis will impact the Trump campaign, and a caution:
  • eyond that, the origin of their cases is unknown,
  • Mr. Biden’s running mate, all tested negative for the coronavirus in the past 24 hours.
  • Oct. 15.
  • Maybe a debate over Zoom?
  • white supremacy group, the Proud Boys, telling them to “stand back and stand by.”
  • “losers” and “suckers.” But Mr. Trump, who has previously dismissed that news report as false, did not take the time to do it onstage or affirm his support for service members. H
  • even some Republicans said that moment crossed the line.
  • But the growing momentum for reforms like ending the filibuster faces a six-foot roadblock: Mr. Biden.
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Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren Pleads Not Guilty To Campaign Finance Charges : Live Upda... - 0 views

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  • The mayor of Rochester, N.Y., Lovely Warren entered a not guilty plea Monday afternoon to campaign finance fraud charges. If convicted, she could be removed from office and be disbarred.
  • The court appearance comes three days after the second-term mayor and two political associates were indicted on charges they knowingly committed finance violations stemming from the 2017 reelection campaign.
  • Separately, Warren is facing mounting criticism for her administration's handling of the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died of asphyxiation in March following an encounter with Rochester police.
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  • Albert Jones Jr., Warren's campaign treasurer, and Rosalind Brooks-Harris, who was the treasurer of a political action committee for Warren and now serves as Rochester's finance director, also entered not guilty pleas.
  • a grand jury handed up indictments, which include a first-degree charge of scheme to defraud and campaign finance violations "for the purpose of evading the contribution limits set by law."
  • "I don't believe this affects her ability to serve as the mayor,
  • While Warren has resisted calls thus far to resign, the charges will surely be damaging to her reelection prospects. She plans to seek another term when the current one expires at the end of next year
  • Prosecutors would not disclose the specific amount of the alleged violation, but they suggested it could be several hundred thousand dollars.
  • Mayoral business needs to continue. I don't want to disrupt that and I want us to continue in our community," she added.
  • The mayor has not commented publicly since the indictment was announced. However, an attorney for Warren told WXXI that she is innocent of the charges.
  • "She did not knowingly violate the law and she's anxious to get this process started and she's ready to go to trial."
  • Both charges are nonviolent Class E felonies, which if convicted, carry a range of sentences from no jail time to four years in prison, according to Rochester-based NPR member station WXXI. Warren could also lose her law license if found guilty. According to state law, a felony conviction would also be grounds for removal from office.
  • Warren's office has previously said she was not informed of the full details of Prude's death until August, roughly five months after he died following an encounter with police. Critics have called that timeline into question.
  • Prude had suffered from mental health issues, when was fatally restrained by police in Rochester. Prude's brother called 911 to report Prude was missing and suffering from a mental health crisis. When police encountered Prude, he was naked and there are reports that he said he had the coronavirus. Police handcuffed Prude and placed a mesh covering over his head, known as a "spit hood," to prevent him from spitting and biting.
  • Officers then held his head to the ground.
  • Last month, Warren fired then-police chief La'Ron Singletary, two weeks before he planned to step down from the post. Warren has also requested federal investigations and citywide reforms since Prude's death became widely known following the release of police footage last month. The footage sparked protests and accusations of a police cover-up.
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Which 'Succession' Character is James Murdoch? - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • Mr. Murdoch, 47, resigned from the board of News Corp this summer with an elliptical statement, saying he was leaving “due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.”
  • in his briskly analytical way, over lunch and a subsequent phone call, he tried to explain why he “pulled the rip cord,” as he put it, after deepening estrangement with his father and brother and growing discomfort over the toxicity of Fox News and other conservative News Corp properties.
  • “I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important,” he told me. “But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas
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  • A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact, if you will.
  • In 2017, President Trump’s praise for white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., as “very fine people” spurred James Murdoch to give $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League. In an email to friends obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Murdoch rebuked Mr. Trump and wrote: “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists.”
  • In January, James and his wife, Kathryn, expressed “frustration” about News Corp’s peddling of climate change denialism in the face of apocalyptic Australian wildfires that incinerated 46 million acres. Fox nighttime anchors picked up a false story line about arson from The Australian, a Murdoch-owned newspaper in Oz.
  • So it wasn’t possible to change News Corp from the inside?“I think there’s only so much you can do if you’re not an executive, you’re on the board, you’re quite removed from a lot of the day-to-day decisions, obviously,” he said. “And if you’re uncomfortable with those decisions, you have to take stock of whether or not you want to be associated and can you change it or not. I decided that I could be much more effective outside.”
  • Friends say that James has been on a collision course with his family for 15 years. His evolution has been profoundly influenced by his wife, a former communications executive. He is, as one friend puts it, “living much more in his own skin, realizing his better angels and his better instincts.”
  • But when your last name is Murdoch and those billions sloshing around in your bank account come from a juggernaut co-opting governments across the English-speaking world and perpetuating climate-change denial, nativism and Sean Hannity, can you ever start fresh? As a beneficiary of his family’s trust, James is still reaping profits from Rupert Murdoch’s assets. Can he be the anti-venom?
  • Murdoch watchers across media say James is aligned with his sister Elisabeth and his half sister, Prudence, even as he is estranged from his father and brother.
  • When Rupert, 89, finally leaves the stage and his elder children take over, that could make three votes in the family trust against one
  • Is there still time to de-Foxify Fox News — labeled a “hate-for-profit racket” by Elizabeth Warren — and other conservative News Corp outlets? Would Fox and its kin — downscale, feral creatures conjured by Rupert to help the bottom line — be the huge moneymakers they are if they went straight?
  • He is particularly excited about investing in start-ups created to combat fake news and the spread of disinformation, having found the proliferation of deep fakes “terrifying” because they “undermine our ability to discern what’s true and what’s not” and it “is only at the beginning as far as I can tell.”
  • He’s funding a research program to study digital manipulation of societies, hoping to curtail “the use of technology to promulgate totalitarianism’’ and undermine democracies.
  • I noted to Ms. Murdoch that the effect of News Corp on the world is astounding when you think about it, from Brexit to Trump to the Supreme Court we may be heading toward.
  • I wonder if this is some sort of expiation, given all the disinformation that News Corp has spewed.
  • when I talked to Kathryn Murdoch over Zoom from their farm in Connecticut, where they live with their three teenagers, chickens and sheep, she was more direct about the issue of using money made from disinformation to combat disinformation.
  • “I think that what’s important about what we’re doing is that we’re in control of ourselves,” she said, adding: “I’m in control of what I do, he is in control of what he does. We should be held accountable for those things. It’s very hard to be held accountable for things that other people do or are in control of. And I think that’s what was untenable.”
  • Their foundation, Quadrivium, has supported voter participation, democracy reform and climate change projects. “I never thought that we would actually be at the point where we would have climate change effects and people would still be denying it,” Ms. Murdoch said.
  • Mr. Murdoch donated to Pete Buttigieg in the primary, and the couple has given $1.23 million to Joe Biden. So that’s who he’ll be voting for in November then? “Hell yes,” he said with a smile.
  • “So everything from the use of mass surveillance, telephone networks, 5G, all that stuff, domestically in a country like China, for example,” he said.
  • After so much time in the executive suite, Mr. Murdoch seems genuinely excited to be in a smaller shop. He said last year, just for the hell of it, he thought of becoming an architect, going back to school.
  • “The outside world,” he continued, “it looks at you and says, ‘Well, these are the runners and riders. This person is up and down and this is success and this is failure.’ I think that that has to come much more from yourself. I’m incredibly grateful to be able to be just a totally free agent.”
  • I wondered what he made of Fox and Mr. Trump playing down the coronavirus, even after the president was hospitalized.“Look, you do worry about it and I think that we’re in the middle of a public health crisis,” Mr. Murdoch said. “Climate is also a public health crisis.” He continued: “Whatever political spin on that, if it gets in the way of delivering crucial public health information, I think is pretty bad.”
  • He added that Mr. Trump’s likening Covid-19 to the flu has been “his message from Day 1,” and is “craziness.” He thinks that “companies have a responsibility to their customers and their communities” and “that responsibility shouldn’t be compromised by political point scoring, that’s for sure.”
  • “I’m just concerned that the leadership that we have, to me, just seems characterized by callousness and a level of cruelty that I think is really dangerous and then it infects the population,” he said, referring to the Trump administration. “It’s not a coincidence that the number of hate crimes in this country are rising over the last three years for the first time in a long time.”
  • With Mr. Trump and Fox, who is the dog and who is the tail?“It looks to me, anyway, like it’s going to be a hard thing to understand because it probably goes back and forth,’’ he said. “I don’t think you’re going to get one pristine, consistent analysis of that phenomenon.”
  • Confirm or Deny
  • Most of your success has come from hard work, not luck.Isn’t that what they say — the harder you work, the luckier you get?
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