The Editorial Board of The Guardian presents The Guardian view on the press and Donald Trump: at work, not at war:
Press freedom was not invented in the United States, but there are few nations in which the importance of an independent press has been so closely woven into its long history. This great American tradition of civic respect for truth and truth-telling is now under threat. Donald Trump is not the first US president to attack the press or to feel unfairly treated by it. But he is the first who appears to have a calculated and consistent policy of undermining, delegitimising and even endangering the press’s work.
On Thursday, following an initiative by the Boston Globe, it is expected that some 350 editorial boards in news organisations across the United States will publish their own editorial comments on this issue. There is, of course, a risk in this initiative, and there will be differing press views about it. For some, including Mr Trump, it will feed the narrative that there is a partisan war between the press and the president. But the breadth of the response to the Boston Globe’s suggestion – and the fact that each editorial will be separately and independently written – suggests something different: that those who report and comment, day in and day out, in as professional and objective a manner as we can, are concerned that public respect for journalistic truth, reason and civility are under a new and present threat against which we must stand as best we can. As one editor has put it: we’re not at war with the Trump administration, we’re at work. [...]
It is not the press’s job to save the United States from Mr Trump. It is the press’s job to report, delve, analyse and scrutinise as best it can and without fear. The press has many faults. It can be self-regarding. Far worse, in Mr Trump’s America, some parts of the media are partisan outlets which show a cavalier disregard for truth: the president has embraced these. But a free press must call out intimidation and incitement when it exists. And it must do what it can to preserve respect for the facts and for balanced judgment. In short, it must do its job.
Here are excerpts from other newspapers from Boston Globe. Its own editorial—Journalists Are Not the Enemy—is behind a paywall. But you can read excerpts from other newspapers at that link, and The New York Times has published its own roster of excerpts here.
David Dayen at The New Republic writes—How to Cure Corporate America’s Selfishness. Senator Elizabeth Warren has a simple idea for keeping big business accountable to the American public, not just shareholders:
Corporations have always been “creatures of the State,” as Teddy Roosevelt once called them. But they have become a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, unmoored from their creators to wreak havoc on the countryside. Corporations no longer consider the broad public interest in making decisions, nor do they worry that the state will ever revoke their license to operate. They only consider the desires of their shareholders, which has led to record corporate profits, stagnant wages, soaring inequality, and a shrinking middle class.
On Wednesday, Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed a counterweight to this relatively recent phenomenon in American business. Her bill, the Accountable Capitalism Act, revolves around a simple idea: The government would grant corporations the right to exist through a public charter, and could use that power to put obligations on corporations to benefit the broader public rather than a small handful of shareholders.
A federal corporate charter, required for all companies with over $1 billion in annual revenue, would be granted through a new Office of United States Corporations in the Commerce Department. The charter could be revoked if corporations didn’t follow its rules, including engaging in “repeated and egregious illegal conduct.” Shareholders could also sue companies for charter violations. “For the past 30 years we have put the American stamp of approval on giant corporations, even as they have ignored the interests of all but a tiny slice of Americans,” Warren wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing the bill. “We should insist on a new deal.”
I’ve argued previously that the corporate charter can be a powerful tool against recidivist corporate lawbreakers who continually harm the public. But charters are primarily conferred at the state level, and states haven’t really enforced them, worried about losing corporate tax revenue. A federal charter short-circuits that fear, and establishes a set of common, enforceable standards of corporate conduct.
It’s not a cure for everything corporate that afflicts us. But it would treat some of the symptoms effectively. Some critics say Warren’s legislation will kill capitalism. Which, I guess, is a hyperbolic step up from their criticism of the Consumer Safety Finance Board, a Warren-inspired entity they implied would only deeply wound capitalism. This bit of legislation is, of course, going nowhere in the current congressional configuration, but it is a reminder for those of us who have forgotten what the Democratic Party should be doing in the wake of the Great Recession and the greatest inequality in the past 90 years.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Democrats have a chance to shape politics for a decade:
Republicans control 33 governorships to only 16 for the Democrats, with one independent in Alaska. Democrats are defending just nine governorships this year, and only four seem competitive. Cook rates Minnesota along with Connecticut as the most vulnerable Democratic-held seats, one reason the party welcomed the GOP primary results. Colorado and Oregon also look to be closely contested.
On the other hand, 11 of the Republicans’ 26 governorships at stake this year appear vulnerable. Illinois and New Mexico already lean Democratic, and seven others are toss-ups. These include the powerhouse states of Florida, Michigan and Ohio. The GOP will also have to struggle to hold on to Wisconsin and Georgia.
The governments elected this year will be key to drawing congressional and state legislative district lines after the 2020 Census. So even Republicans who demonstrated slavish loyalty to Trump to win primaries are likely to regret his presidency (and their own ideological enthusiasms) if 2018 leads to a statehouse catastrophe. They have been playing with fire, and it could consume them.
Alexander Sammon at The New Republic writes—How an Environmental Catastrophe Could Decide Florida’s Senate Race:
Florida’s Senate race, where incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson has been steadily losing ground to Republican Rick Scott, could decide which party controls the Senate next year. And at the moment, it seems to hinge on an unusual issue: algae.
The state is dealing with one of the worst algal blooms in its history. A noxious “red tide” has coated 100 miles of beaches along the Gulf Coast with sludge and the carcasses of thousands of fish, sea turtles, and manatees. A 26-foot whale shark even floated ashore earlier this month—the first ever, TheWashington Post reported, to be killed by algae. The crisis hasn’t just driven away tourists and hurt local businesses. It’s caused respiratory illnesses, headaches, rashes, and gastrointestinal distress all along the Florida coastline.
Now, both Scott and Nelson are campaigning on the algal bloom, laying the blame on each other in TV ads and in speeches. Though it would appear to be a local issue, it touches on a range of issues—deregulation, the environment, cronyism—that are playing out at the national level. And for Democrats looking for a foothold in the rapidly reddening South, where some of the nation’s most pressing climate and environmental issues have become a daily reality, the urgency of environmental action may provide the blueprint for competing in heavily Republican districts.
Josephine Livingstone at The New Republic writes—TV’s True Crime Voyeurism Reaches Its Crude End:
A new TV show called I Am A Killer pushes the genre to the absolute limit of acceptability—then goes right across it, arriving at the gruesome apotheosis of our obsession with killers and killing. The show (produced by Sky Vision and distributed by Netflix) is a documentary series that interviews a different man on death row in each episode. The show represents the crossing of a cultural rubicon, the transformation of something abnormal into ordinary entertainment. [...]
Still, this kind of television is not normal, for want of a better term. There are good reasons for depriving convicted murderers of screen time. In the case of a Texan named Charles Thompson, for example, we meet the foreman of the jury who sentenced him to death. “He’s narcissistic, he enjoys the attention,” she says. These men will glory in their brief moment of celebrity. They’re all lit well, and allowed to deliver their own version of events, in their own words. Is this how justice is supposed to work, with TV supplementing the courts in the battle for a criminal’s reputation?
In this, I Am A Killer struggles to justify its own existence. Convictions are made of narrative, true, and there is always “more than one side to the story.” Broadcasting the soon-to-be-gone stories of soon-to-be-dead men, however, is cruel and unusual business.
Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News writes—How a small band of Philly Quakers cracked the code for protesting in the Trump Age:
How’s this for a David-vs.-Goliath scenario? On the stage this day in Tampa, Fla., sat the board of directors of one of America’s most powerful financial institutions, PNC Bank. In the audience, surrounded by bank shareholders, was one lone dissenter, Eileen Flanagan, who’d come down from Philadelphia and — despite strict laws in the Sunshine State against verbal protests at public company meetings — had made it inside the room.
Despite those laws and despite PNC fleeing its Pittsburgh headquarters to meet 1,000 miles south of where Quaker environmental activists had disrupted the prior year’s meeting, the Philadelphia-based protesters had connected with local students in the Tampa area to conduct a noisy protest outside. Now, Flanagan watched in amazement as the serious men in suits onstage raced through their meeting, reeking of fear that someone inside the room might do something disruptive.
Some 16 minutes in, Flanagan stood up to remove her jacket and reveal her T-shirt calling on PNC to stop its financing of earth-scarring mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia, and to pray in silence. The bank board moved to shut down the meeting immediately.
“They were so worried about what we were going to do,” recalled Flanagan, a lifelong activist who was then board chairman of the Earth Quaker Action Team, or EQAT (pronounced “equate”). When she stood up and PNC board members cut short the meeting, she knew the protesters had all but won. Sure enough, PNC announced in early 2015 that, in essence, it would no longer fund the controversial coal-mining practice, and not long after that, a major firm involved in mountaintop mining filed for bankruptcy.
Today, Flanagan and her EQAT are deep into another long-shot underdog campaign — campaigning with the interfaith group POWER to persuade Peco Energy to draw more of its electricity from local solar to create jobs in Philadelphia — but they also have something else to offer that’s of great importance: lessons for the thousands of newly created activists in opposition to the Trump presidency.
Mike Konczal at The Nation writes—The Shareholder Revolution Devours Its Children:
In the early 1980s, economists started to believe that a company’s only goal should be to maximize the wealth of shareholders, who would then pour money back into the economy as investments. During this time, our laws and institutions were radically overhauled to make this happen. One especially crucial change occurred in 1982, when the Securities and Exchange Commission made it legal for firms to buy back company shares—giving more money to investors and allowing corporate boards to prop up stock prices. This “shareholder revolution” transformed the nature of capitalism, though it has taken until now to see just how extreme it would be.
Granted, shareholders have always gotten returns in the form of dividends for—at least in theory—bearing risk and monitoring management, but the scale is new. From the 1950s to 1970s, shareholders took about a third of corporate profits. Since the year 2000, they’ve been taking more than twice that. You can get a sense of the magnitude by comparing shareholder wealth to the entire US economy. During the 1960s, shareholders took about 1.7 percent of GDP in the cash paid in dividends and in the net number of stocks that were bought; now it’s around 4.7 percent of GDP. This is a shift of about 3 percent of GDP, or $567 billion a year.
President Trump’s tax cuts all but guaranteed that 2018 would be a fantastic year for shareholders. Predictably, corporations are taking advantage of this windfall not by funding other companies or boosting worker pay, but by showering their shareholders with cash. Of course, 2017 wasn’t a bad year for shareholders either. Indeed, the last four decades have seen shareholders take home larger and larger slices of the economic pieords. Is this how justice is supposed to work, with TV supplementing the courts in the battle for a criminal’s reputation?
Fiona Sturges at The Guardian writes—All hail Madonna, a 60-year-old woman who won’t be quiet. She is still defying the critics who tell older women to ‘gracefully’ fade away:
Is Madonna dead?” my daughter asked recently, while we danced like idiots in the kitchen to Vogue. Having spent a good few months inculcating my child with Madonna’s back catalogue, I realised I’d told her nothing about the woman herself. My daughter is still young enough to have no interest in the age of the singers she listens to – living or dead is generally enough information for her. If only we all felt that way.
Pop music is an unforgiving place for the older woman. Few know this better than Madonna, who turns 60 on Thursday, and whose every move in the past 15 years has been accompanied by a grim chorus of “Put it away, grandma”. That the entertainment industry is among the worst culprits when it comes to fading out women – note in comparison the scores of male actors and musicians carrying on into their 60s and 70s unimpeded – is especially depressing since it’s a business that directly influences how we think and live. But we can take heart that, as with so many aspects of the female experience, Madonna is doing her damnedest to put it right.
Khaled A. Beydoun at The Guardian writes—My friend Rashida: far more than the first Muslim American congresswoman:
I walked into Rashida Tlaib’s election watch party shortly after midnight. Making the 15-minute drive from downtown Detroit, where Abdul El-Sayed, the Muslim physician hopeful for the Michigan governorship held his party, to the gritty Old Redford neighborhood on the city’s northwest side, where Rashida set up her headquarters.
Hip-hop, salsa, Detroit house and Arabic music thumped from the speakers. The cafe walls, where the party was being held, were adorned with the work of local artists. There were no suits or gowns, just the squeak of sneakers and blue campaign T-shirts filling the room. Tlaib’s party felt like a real party, where millennials of all races mingled naturally with middle-aged and elderly supporters that were celebrating as the results rolled in. The mood was the opposite of the party for El-Sayed, who conceded to his opponent roughly two hours earlier, in a neighborhood far from the gentrifying sections of Detroit and even farther from the cameras touting the once-bankrupt city’s “comeback”.
But this is precisely who the candidate – widely known by her first name alone – is. And exactly where the seasoned community organizer and southwest Detroit-bred politician, celebrated as “the first Muslim American congresswoman”, is supposed to be.
Nearly 12 years earlier, I walked into Rashida’s office at the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (Access) looking for support against a ballot proposal that sought to abolish affirmative action in Michigan – also my home state.
After scores of Arab and Muslim American community leaders slammed their doors shut on standing for racial equity in Michigan, the lot of them branding affirmative action “a black issue that doesn’t concern us,” Rashida took no convincing, instantly lending her individual support and the entire weight of her organization.
Martin Longman at The Washington Monthly writes—My Faith is in Nemesis:
In my political writing, I very rarely find much use for my study of Ancient Greek language or philosophy, but lately I’ve been thinking more and more about Nemesis, the “goddess of indignation” who exacted retribution for foul acts and brought down to size anyone enjoying an undeserved good fortune. Another culture might call this karma or “just deserts.” The Book of Proverbs says, “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” I think every culture knows the feeling that someone deserves a good comeuppance. Indignation is a universal emotion. [...]
But Nemesis is more satisfying when someone who richly deserves it has already experienced their fall. That’s when the goddess seems to be active in the world and doing her job. When someone emerges on the world stage and collects immense power and commits one egregious act after another with seeming impunity, that’s a direct challenge to faith in Nemesis.
Donald Trump has had a long stretch of impunity and it’s causing a huge spike in indignation. That’s why I don’t think of him as the tragic hero whose downfall evokes pity. King Oedipus had no way of knowing that he’d killed his father and married his mother so the Gods’ wrath seemed something less than just. Trump knows exactly what he’s done wrong and he’s tempted fate for so long that he might just sense that his luck will run out. I think of him more as Narcissus [...]
As long as Trumpsissus drifts into oblivion in front of a stainless steel prison mirror, I’m down with the ending of that myth.
Mike Ludwig at Truthout writes—Trump Signs Legislation Pumping Billions More Into War Machine:
President Trump signed the 2019 defense spending authorization bill on Monday, increasing domestic spending on what is already the world’s largest military. This comes as global military spending reaches the highest level since the end of the Cold War.
With the president’s signature, the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act approves $717 billion in spending on the US military and related industries, a $17 billion increase from 2018. Discretionary spending will increase by about $100 billion from 2017 levels, according to the Congressional Research Service. The legislation sets the bar for future defense spending, but appropriations bills are required to dole the money out.
Spending on overseas conflicts such as the 17-year-old war in Afghanistan will increase by more than $2 billion to $69 billion, the highest price tag since 2014. Taxpayers in the United States have spent about $5.6 trillion on the “war on terror” since 2001, and the nation continues to spend billions every year supporting operations in countries such as Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. [...]
The sprawling US military alone accounts for about 40 percent of global military spending, which is growing once again under the Trump administration after gradually shrinking during the later years of the Obama administration. Trump has repeatedly claimed that he is delivering military funding at “historic” levels, but defense spending actually peaked during the height of the Iraq War in 2010.