Trump’s Portland Clampdown Exposes Republican Hypocrisy on ‘State’s Rights’
Declaring his intent to “dominate” protestors exercising their First Amendment rights, Donald Trump has spent much of July sending federal paramilitaries into Portland, Oregon ostensibly to guard government buildings.
Dressed in camouflage, as if for combat, Homeland Security and repurposed border patrol officers armed with tear gas, batons and other riot gear, ventured far from the government buildings they were seemingly sent to protect to accost and arrest dozens of the overwhelmingly peaceful protestors who had gathered in the country’s 26th largest city every day since May 25th when a police officer in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, during an arrest for allegedly using a counterfeit bill.
Yet Republicans, who have long preached the sanctity of “states rights,” have been conspicuously silent.
In fact, apart from Tennessee Sen. Rand Paul, Republicans have applauded the crackdown despite chilling videos showing the heavily armed officers pulling protesters into unmarked vans and arresting them without warrants or probable cause. No matter that many of those taken into custody, Vox reported, hadn’t clearly violated any laws. A Portland attorney who had joined a “Wall of Moms” protest in support of Black Lives Matter reported being groped and assaulted by a U.S. Marshall who arrested her.
Nathan Howard/Getty Images
At a different time during a different administration, self-described conservatives might be vigorously condemning federal troops being sent covertly into a state where the governor had expressly rejected their entry. Had a Democratic administration sent U.S. Homeland Security paramilitary officers to Portland, Republicans might be patrolling the city’s streets waving “Don’t Tread on Me” flags while party leaders took to Fox News to talk up the 10th Amendment.
But there is little mention from Republicans about the 10th Amendment, which affords states a strong dose of autonomy, or Ronald Reagan’s “New Federalism,” the overarching initiative that the increasingly libertarian party has used for 40 years to rationalize the federal government’s retreat from the progressive social policies and economic programs that fueled the -class expansion following World War II and solidified the gains of the civil rights movement.
Time was when Republicans really did talk up “state’s rights.”
Back in the winter of 1963, Alabama Gov. George Wallace embraced that very battle cry when he stood on the steps of the University of Alabama flanked by state troopers to refuse entry to two Alabama-born black students, Vivian Malone and James A. Hood. When JFK threatened to send 100 members of the Alabama National Guard to Tuscaloosa to allow Malone and Hood to enroll, Wallace backed down contending that he was only defending the right of the state’s legislature to govern without federal interference.
JFK, for his part, was enforcing the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, which ordered lower courts to overturn state and local laws that mandated segregation (citing the 14th Amendment.) The Brown decision prompted a flurry of legislation in southern states that denounced the court order as an “illegal encroachment” on state’s rights, declaring it “null, void and of no effect.”
The backlash against Brown was led by South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, the state’s former governor who just six years earlier had run for president under the States Rights Democratic Party. Known historically as the Dixiecrats, Thurmond’s party was launched to oppose Democratic President Harry S. Truman’s 1948 presidential order to desegregate the U.S. military.
Republican embrace of state’s rights was given its more modern imprimatur when Reagan visited the Neshoba County (Mississippi) Fair in August 1980 immediately after becoming the party’s presidential nominee. In a speech delivered a short distance from where three civil rights workers were murdered by local Klansmen, Reagan made clear that he aimed to rewrite the role of the federal government.
In recent years, Republicans successfully challenged Congress’ 2009 effort to apply the 1967 Age Discrimination Act to state employers, and in 2000, to prevent the 1994 Violence Against Women Act from also being applied to the states. When it comes to the right to vote, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell (KY), the majority leader, staunchly defends the right of state legislatures to prescribe “quote – the time, places and manner of holding elections” to justify the Kentucky legislature’s decision to block state residents from voting on an amendment that would restore voting rights to felons.
Yet Republican hypocrisy on state’s rights didn’t suddenly emerge in Portland. It was manifest in the party’s recent opposition to state laws allowing for the purchase of small quantities of marijuana as well as the efforts of California and other states to toughen laws over auto emissions.
Republican’s selective application of Reagan’s “New Federalism” wasn’t lost on Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden who asked in an interview with Business Insider, “Where are the Senate Republicans who preach ‘state rights’ and freedoms as Trump sends paramilitary forces into cities uninvited and tramples on the Constitution?”
The illegality of Trump’s use of Homeland Security officers to harass protestors, though, cuts across more than just the 10th Amendment. In Trump’s own ranting executive order, the authoritarian-inspired real estate developer singled out “anarchists and left-wing extremists,” a blatant show of viewpoint discrimination that clearly violates a century of Supreme Court rulings shaping the modern interpretation of the First Amendment.
Ironically, most of the arrests in Portland were for assaults on federal officers or failing to comply with law enforcement commands rather than the desecration of federal buildings. In other words, “their presence here escalates,” the situation,” said Oregon Gov. Kate Brown. “It throws gasoline on the fire.”
As anyone but the most hardened Fox News viewer can appreciate, the crackdown in Portland isn’t about “fighting crime” or cooling public anger over the Floyd murder, it’s for domestic consumption. It’s intended to divert public exasperation away from the Trump Administration’s tragic mishandling of the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
A great deal of litigation is certain to follow. Laurence Tribe, professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School, boiled it down when her wrote that the “deployment of this clandestine force, answerable only to the president, is manifestly unconstitutional. Our federalist system prohibits the federal government from policing the streets where, as here, state and local authorities are equipped to preserve domestic tranquility and have not been demonstrably overwhelmed.”
There is no doubt that the 10th Amendment clears out space for state’s rights. Indeed, the right of Portland and Oregon officials to police their own street without federal intervention fits snugly into the U.S. Constitution.
Trump’s Juneteenth Tulsa Trip Smacks of Reagan’s 1980 Campaign Visit to Rural Mississippi
In pursuit of the presidency, and the defeat of an incumbent southern Democrat, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign took a trip to a sparsely populated county in rural Mississippi to win over working-class white voters bitterly enraged by federal laws and court orders aimed at integration.
To win over the people of Neshoba County, Mississippi, Reagan boasted of his firm belief in “states rights,” a code word for sustaining the apartheid rules of Jim Crow. Reagan was eager cement the support of white working class Southerners who had voted Democrat ever since FDR’s New Deal helped pull them out of poverty.
Not lost on either the attendees or reporters covering the visit by the Republican presidential nominee, Neshoba’s county seat, Philadelphia, Mississippi, was the site of one of the most infamous murders of the civil rights movement: the June 1964 killing of three civil right workers, two white men and one black man, by local members of the Ku Klux Klan. The murders grabbed national, and international headlines, and painted Neshoba County with infamy. For much of the country, Neshoba was the home of hardened segregationists. For locals, the Freedom Summer volunteers were intruders who had no business telling Mississippians how they should run their local elections, or any other aspect of their closed society.
Forty years later, the Republican President Donald Trump, an heir of Ronald Reagan’s successful cementing of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” decided upon Tulsa, Oklahoma as the site for his first major public rally since coronavirus outbreak and the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis sparked protests and rallies in more than 140 cities and towns across the country. Curiously, Trump had chosen to speak in Tulsa on June 19th, widely-known among African-Americans as Juneteenth, the official end of slavery in 1865.
When political opponents blasted Trump for the apparently tone-deaf timing of the Tulsa rally, he backed off, moving the event to the following day. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott explained that the president was unaware of the significance of Juneteenth or the 1921 massacre in Tulsa by a white mob that attacked, murdered and burned the black neighborhood of the city’s Greenwood District, known at that time as the Black Wall Street, shooting and killing up to 300 people (though some historians place the death toll even higher.)
Though the Republican Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford acknowledged “there are special sensitivities there in Tulsa,” to the Greenwood Massacre, the timing of the campaign rally, Trump said, coming as it does in the wake of the George Floyd protests, should be seen as a “celebration.” Exactly who might be celebrating was unclear though judging from Trump’s recent tweets extolling “law and order,” the president aims to appeal to those more bothered by the destruction of some stores in the wake of the protests than the propensity of police officers to use excessive force against blacks than white and other minorities.
Back in 1980, Ronald Reagan took much the same approach. Reagan, the toothy, B-movie actor who made his political mark in Hollywood supporting Joe McCarthy’s virulent and largely successful attack on liberals and other dissidents, wanted the all-white crowd at the Neshoba County Fair to know that he understood their contempt for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). By 1980, however, those frustrations centered on forced busing, and similar federal and court efforts to end discrimination in housing, employment and voting.
The first Presidential candidate to speak at the fair, Reagan keenly understood that white Southerners, as well as working-class whites in northern cities, long had viewed federal efforts to end institutional racism as illegitimate federal intervention. Considering that Neshoba County’s population was 24,000 in 1980 (today, it’s 29,000), Reagan’s trip to rural Mississippi was a very big deal.
“I believe in state’s rights,” Reagan told the overwhelmingly white crowd. “I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”
Reagan never mentioned the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner even though the fairgrounds were a short distance from where the bodies of the three young men were found in an earthen dam. Reagan also didn’t speak in favor of the civil rights movement, which had exposed Mississippi, with its proportionately large black population, as a cruel place for anyone advocating racial equality. Reagan would defeat Georgia’s Jimmy Carter in 1980, taking Mississippi by 1%.
It is questionable whether President Trump will mention the Greenwood Massacre when he speaks in Tulsa later this week, 99 years after the largest race riot in American history. Greenwood’s 35 square-blocks was home to one of the largest concentrations of African-American-owned enterprises and wealth in this country. It is unlikely that Trump will remark on the recent discovery of mass graves used to bury victims of the firebombing or local efforts in Tulsa to officially recognize and make amends for the murder and destruction.
Just as a prominent Mississippi Republican had recommended Neshoba County as the place where Ronald Reagan could find “George Wallace-inclined voters,” Donald Trump has chosen Tulsa as the place to reconnect with those his so-called “base” who apparently also view the multi-racial George Floyd protestors as “thugs” or applaud this president’s threat that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” No Republican or Democratic presidential candidate visited the Neshoba County Fair until Trump sent his son Donald Trump Jr. to the event in August 2016 immediately after the Republican convention rather than to a previously scheduled event aimed at Latinos.
Trump, in the words of Mississippi writer David Dallas, shows no signs of rejecting his party’s “race-baiting Reagan legacy.
If there was any doubt about Reagan’s eagerness to use race to win over white voters, he visited Neshoba again for his 1984 re-election campaign, and offered, to the delight of the white crowd, the Confederate battle cry of “The South Shall Rise Again.” Similarly, Trump is betting his Tulsa rally will also help bring him a second term.
This Stunning New Youth Movement for Social Change
The enormous, spontaneous, social protest movement that emerged following the video images of George Floyd’s death will be remembered for many things.
First among them is that the issue of police brutality against black men and women went national. It was a cause embraced by protestors in cities and towns large and small across the country (more than 140, and counting.) That didn’t happen in the 1960s. That didn’t happen during the Reagan years nor during the demonstrations against the U.S. war in Iraq. Public protests took place mostly on college campuses and a handful of large cities.
Also new was the leaderless construction of these gatherings. That wasn’t by accident. Contemporary activist organizations have learned that movements without a clear set of leaders are harder to vilify. It’s maddening for critics, and for much of the media, who want to interview and oftentimes, to demonize leaders in order to discredit a movement. A movement without a clear set of leaders keeps the focus on the issue, in this case police brutality (though not limited to it.)
Black Lives Matter, which formed in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. in 2014 and Eric Garner a month earlier in Staten Island, N.Y., has consistently adhered to the leaderless form. The group has also learned a lot about the police, and police tactics; the oppressed are generally more perceptive about the oppressor than the reverse. Groups of white demonstrators are sometimes pushed to the front of a crowd as a means of showing police that the demonstrators are multi-racial while owing to the propensity of police forces to treat whites less harshly than blacks.
Importantly, the rallies, demos and gatherings, especially in cities smaller than New York or Los Angeles, have become teach-ins, opportunities to meet, to organize, to build local networks. More generally, the protests have become a gigantic coming-out party for a Millennial generation that has long been accused of being self-centered or unconcerned with the world around them. The fact is that this generation is naturally connected to social media, and its historically exceptional means to organize and inform. The ability to communicate quickly with like-minded people has made it possible to hold demonstrations anywhere at any time.
And then there’s the factor of Covid-19, and how that shaped these demonstrations. That these protests took place during an alarmingly dangerous global pandemic made for a decidedly younger demographic. Teenagers, men and women in their 20s and 30s, were more likely to brave fears of contracting this virus than older folks. After more than two months of quarantine, it was simply untenable to sit by idly while police killed an unarmed black man in broad daylight. Add to that picture a president who has long offered unveiled support for white supremacists, authoritarian dictators and the cruel treatment of undocumented immigrant, not protesting was indefensible.
Once the video of George Floyd’s brutal death went viral, thousands of young people, cooped-up inside of their homes, decided en masse that this murder, this death, in the midst of a pandemic and a deeply troubling presidency, was so serious that they would risk their own personal health to protest.
As for the gathering themselves, Covid cleared out the oldsters. There was no Jesse Jackson or Rev. Al Sharpton or even celebrities such as Susan Sarandon to lead the protests. The generation of the 1960s or the Reagan years or the Iraq War couldn’t play the elder card to take the microphone. Most importantly, this was a multi-cultural movement of black and white, Latino and Asian, African and European. And while some of the older-than-40 crowd weaved their way in, the crowds and crowds of protestors, whether amassed in Brooklyn or Boston, Columbus or Louisville, or even Fargo and Boise, skewed young. For political organizer anxious about getting young people to actually vote in November’s election, this organic participation in dissent was probably the best news of all.
The George Floyd protests protests have the potential to eclipse the anti-government Tea Party Protests that emerged in 2009 following the Obama Administration’s efforts to address the loss of jobs and housing caused by the Great Recession. The Tea Party movement was sparked by an on-air rant from the CNBC bond market commentator Rick Santelli when he used his usual live broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade to assail Obama’s decision to assist distressed homeowners. It was pure populism. In Santelli’s estimation taxpayer money shouldn’t be used to “bail out” thousands of homeowners who had been forced to default on their loans. And millions of people agreed.
The Rant, as it became known, fueled the Tea Party Movement, a mix of libertarian and “small government” . and the Democrats loss of the senate in the mid-term elections of 2010 the accompanying ascendancy of Mitch McConnell as a national powerbroker hellbent on obstruction.
The Tea Party movement eventually petered out but its adherents found new life in the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump. The murder of George Floyd, meanwhile, has given form to a nascent movement that has been lying in rage for three years, simmering, exasperated, but not entirely sure how it could all come together.
One early sign is very positive: even as the focus turned to the issue of police oversight and accountability, the larger issue of alternative to police funding, took center stage. Calls to reduce the New York Police Department’s $6 billion budget by $1 billion, and spend that money on schools, job training and neighborhood improvements, has gathered steam leading credence to the notion that the George Floyd protests weren’t only about police brutality. There’s far too much going on.
After George Floyd and Jacob Blake, America’s Police Still Need a Lesson in the First Amendment
In 1919, the iconic Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes told his mostly conservative colleagues on the court that the actions of Jacob Abrams and four other Russian immigrants to print and distribute two leaflets condemning U.S. intervention in the Russian civil war did not present a real or immediate danger to the nation’s security.
In Abrams v. United States, Holmes wrote that “we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions . . . unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purpose of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.”
Apart from the young Justice Louis Brandeis, Holmes’ fellow justices were unimpressed. Abrams and his accomplices lost that case, 7-2, and were given stiff 20-year jail sentences. Mollie Steimer’s sentence was reduced to 15 years on account of being a woman.
But Holmes’ dissent, which turned 100 last year, lived on far longer than his colleagues “crabbed” view of the First Amendment. Holmes’ impassioned and righteous defense of dissent fueled our modern interpretation and subsequent application of the right to free speech and assembly.
Judging by the conduct of too many policemen in response to the George Floyd protests, it is painfully clear that these municipal employees are in dire need of a crash course in civics.
The First Amendment, Holmes wrote, was created to give space to those who offer views counter to society’s prevailing positions or the positions of those in power. In writing his dissent in Abrams, Holmes declared that all views should have space within a “marketplace of ideas.” If such speech is accepted by the citizenry, than so be it. If it is condemned, let that happen as well. What made this country great, Holmes might have said, was its brave experiment in democracy: a government governed by its citizens. Integral to that experience was the First Amendment’s audacious proclamation conferring a right to free speech and assembly.
As the George Floyd protest have sadly made clear, police misconduct, excessive force and gratuitous violence appear to be commonplace. In Indianapolis, Buffalo and repeatedly in New York City, police appeared to take the mere presence of protestors as justification for rough treatment, the gratuitous use of pepper spray or arrests. Groups of heavily-armed police routinely struck peaceful protestors acting well within their constitutional rights to assemble and express dissent. In Tacoma, Wash., a young black protestor, died in policy custody of respiratory arrest due to physical restraint.
Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times
It shouldn’t be a surprise to any but the most dogmatic supporter of the institution of uniformed law enforcement, that ties remain strong between white nationalists groups and so-called militias, and the municipal employees ostensibly employed to offer equal protection of the law. White vigilantes routinely attend Black Lives Matter, according to data collected by Alexander Reid Ross, a doctoral fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right. And when they do, it is not uncommon for them to be treated with kid gloves from local police.
When the self-appointed militia group New Mexico Civil Guard turned up to harass and attack anti-racist protesters in Albuquerque in tktk, police could be overheard referring to vigilantes — founded by a neo-Nazi — as “heavily armed friendlies.” One of those “friendlies” shot and badly injured an anti-racist protester.
Shortly before he allegedly killed two people and severely injured another, the frighteningly young Kyle Rittenhouse was all but given a badge by local Kenosha police.
As the New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote on June 10, Black Lives Matter “activists set out to show that police brutality was pervasive. The police have now made that clear.” For much of the country, the notion that police are impartial arbiters dutifully applying the laws of the land was rudely shattered.
In a later Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Schwimmer (1929), just three years before he retired from the court, Holmes wrote probably his most compelling words in defense of the Constitution’s extraordinary defense of free speech: “if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
Some 50 years after Holmes’ dissent in Abrams, the Supreme Court further expanded the application of free speech in a case of anti-Semitic and anti-black statements made at a small gathering of a Ku Klux Klan faction in a field in rural Hamilton County, Ohio. That case, Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) established that speech advocating illegal conduct is protected under the First Amendment unless the speech is likely to incite “imminent lawless action.”
Brandenburg went beyond Holmes’ “clear and present danger,” to assert that speech was free unless the words were “likely to produce” concrete lawless action. That was an enormously important decision for both police and protestors. While it makes clear the power of non-violent civil disobedience, it also underscores the sanctity of protest, the right to dissent. That the NYPD had been spying on Black Lives Matter activists for five years only served to throw oil on an already simmering fire.
Unlike in decades past, two-thirds of the country expressed their support for the George Floyd protests, an acknowledgement that do no incite “imminent lawless action” are well protected by the First Amendment. Unfortunately, police conduct at protests across the country revealed that too many police appeared to have missed that lesson.
How the Koch Brothers’ ‘Libre Initiative’ Entices Latino Voters
In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s Arizona primary, the Libre Initiative, a group funded by the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, has been hosting a regular series of “citizenship workshops” where local attorneys in Phoenix, Tucson and other cities in Arizona assist eligible Latinos to apply for U.S. citizenship.
The workshops dovetail with other similar, free events: English classes, driver education, health check-ups, back-to-school programs and food donations. Oftentimes, Libre sponsors political and social events with popular Spanish-language media, such as a 2014 candidate forum with Noticias Univision, the top-rated Spanish-language television network, featuring Republican candidates for governor.
Those activities are sponsored by Libre’s education-focused non-profit arm, registered for tax purposes as a 501(c)(3).
At the same time, Libre’s political action group, its 501(c)(4), produces high-quality television and newspaper advertisements, in English and Spanish, featuring Latinos condemning the Affordable Care Act, denouncing government spending, supporting “school choice,” opposing efforts to raise the minimum wage, and publicizing the group itself.
Its director, Daniel Garza, a former White House liaison under George W. Bush, insists that Libre, which means “free” in Spanish, doesn’t “endorse candidates, we endorse ideas, so we drive an agenda of freedom-oriented, free-market policies.”
Nonetheless, it often targets candidates if they support issues or positions that, in Garza’s words, would “lead to more taxes, more regulation, more government growth.”
One 2014 television advertisement was aimed at Democrat Ron Barber who ran for a Tucson congressional seat previously held by Gabby Giffords, who resigned from the office following an attempted assassination that left her critically wounded. The ad featured a young Hispanic man saying that “my generation” can’t afford wasteful spending, while citing Barber’s support of Obamacare.
Barber lost that race by 161 votes to an anti-gun control advocate, Martha McSally who opposed immigration reform and in-state tuition to undocumented students, issues that Latinos support. Congressmen Pete Gallego of Texas and Joe Garcia of Florida were similarly targeted for supporting the Affordable Care Act.
Libre’s two sides work hand-in-hand, say Arizona Latino activists. One seemingly helping Latinos to attain essential services while the other pushes positions that run counter to decades of work by longtime community organizers.
“It’s a bait and switch,” said Ian Danley, director of One Arizona, a coalition of Latino community groups, in an interview from Phoenix. “They have a partisan goal as their end-game not a community goal. They’re not about building a voice that is authentic and represents the real needs of the people. It’s really designed to confuse voters.”
No issue represents this confusion more than immigration, says Francisco Heredia, national field director for Mi Familia Vota, or My Family Votes, a voter registration group.
And there is no issue quite as volatile in Arizona, which is home to self-appointed border militias such the Minutemen. Donald Trump, who is leading Republican polls in Arizona by double-digits, has fueled his campaign in no small part by referring to Mexicans as “thieves” and “rapists,” while pledging to build a wall along wide stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border.
In interviews, Garza says he supports “comprehensive immigration reform” but is quick to add that while Libre favors a “path to citizenship,” the political reality is that Republicans are opposed to such legislation. Therefore, he says, Libre takes a “libertarian” position of supporting a “work-visa bill” and “guest-worker programs.” Critics of this stance charge that it gives employers outsized control of workers.
Garza has also criticized Obama’s executive orders known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, or DACA, as well as the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA, aimed at providing temporary relief from deportation for about five million undocumented immigrants.
And although Garza says he is offended by Trump’s comments on immigration, Libre has supported candidates — Republican Colorado Senator Cory Gardner and Texas Congressman Will Hurd, for example — who opposed Obama’s immigrant initiatives, or in some cases, voted against the 2013 Immigration Modernization Act, which passed the Senate but failed in the House of Representatives.
“Immigration is a core issue in our community,” Heredia said. “It’s plain to see that Libre has another agenda, that it’s not looking for ways to help Latinos here and now. It’s a grass-top kind of approach, building something that works against Latinos’ best interests.”
Garza bristles at accusations that Libre is building a database of potential supporters to be shared with Republican candidates, though Libre did hold a candidate forum forum in Las Vegas in October attended by Jeb Bush, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. Nationally, he says, Libre has sent out “hundreds of thousands of mailers” on issues such as Obamacare, conducted phone banks, made home visits and paid for TV advertisements. Yet the organization’s emphasis is on issues, not candidates.
“There’s this misconception that we’re building this massive user base so that we can get people to vote Republican,” he said. “What we want is to advance free-market policies, that’s our goal, so we use an election as an opportunity to drive those issues. If that aligns with a Republican, than so be it.”
Libre is one of a network of Koch-funded groups that share a common message of cutting taxes, eliminating regulations on businesses and the privatization of most government services. It operates offices in more than 12 states including California, Florida, Colorado, Texas and Virginia, often holding events with other Koch-funded groups such as Generation Opportunity, which focuses on young adults, and Americans for Prosperity, the Koch’s principal advocacy organization.
Libre has received $15.8 million since it began in 2011 out of a Las Vegas office of Freedom Partners, a non-profit backed by the Kochs, The New York Times reported, citing tax records.
Critics contend that these groups’ efforts are aligned with those of the Koch brothers, one of the world’s largest owners of oil, gas and chemical companies and prominent donors to Republican candidates and causes. Libre’s call to support “free-market policies,” says Jennifer Allen, national director for Chispa, an arm of League of Conservation Voters targeting Latinos, translates into boosting politicians who oppose federal limits on carbon pollution from power plants, and other measures aimed at curbing climate change.
Americans for Prosperity, which also emphasizes its “fight for freedom,” opposes Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a proposal aimed at coal-fired power plants. The proposal is being reviewed by the Supreme Court. Koch-funded groups have also pushed legislation in state legislatures opposing federal efforts to combat air and water pollution.
Latino communities, Allen says, are often in neighborhoods that are nearest to power plants and other factories. Yet Latinos, she says, aren’t told that Libre’s call for “economic freedom” means eliminating oversight and restrictions on some of the country’s biggest polluters.
“Libre is very good about establishing certain values, using a common language that is rooted in the values of small government while playing on the words of freedom and opportunity,” Allen said in a phone interview from Phoenix. “Those are important and meaningful words in our community. It all sounds good until you realize what path they’re trying to take the Latino community. And that’s very concerning.”
Harvey Weinstein Shows How Hard It Is to Call Out Powerful Men
Everybody knew, but no one said anything. At least not in public.
Harvey Weinstein, one of the best-known producers in Hollywood, was fired on Sunday, Oct. 8, by the board of directors at Weinstein Co., the film studio he co-founded, after The New York Times detailed decades of sexual harassment and at least eight settlements paid to quiet allegations from becoming public.
Weinstein’s exploits, it appears, was broadly known. The Times quotes an assistant to Harvey’s brother, Bob, that Harvey’s conduct — “requiring [women] to be present while he bathed or repeatedly asking for a massage or initiating one himself — was well known by those at the top of his prior company, Miramax Film Corp.
“It wasn’t a secret to the inner circle,” Kathy DeClesis, an assistant to Bob Weinstein in the early 1990s, told the Times.
Similar comments were made in the wake of Roger Ailes’ ouster at the Fox News Channel, the very profitable network he created with Rupert Murdoch, who controls Twenty-First Century Fox Inc. The same goes for Bill O’Reilly, the bellicose Fox News host who was forced to leave the company after The Times uncovered a similar series of settlements to muzzle sexual or personal misconduct.
And though not directly related to a private or public corporation, Bill Cosby’s behavior, which led to a series of charges of sexual assault, was rumored for years and years. Uber Technologies Inc. founder Travis Kalanick was forced to resign from the company he created following several investigations that revealed how he permitted a culture of sexual harassment, discrimination and bullying to pervade its workplace.
Yet these cases spilled into the public only after someone with the stature of an Ashley Judd or Gretchen Carlson spoke publicly or filed a lawsuit. Or a newspaper with a high profile and history of substantiated investigations documented their authenticity.
“That’s the definition of power,” said Anne Vladeck, a labor and employee law attorney at Vladeck, Raskin & Clark PC who represented former New York Knicks executive Anucha Browne Sanders in her successful sexual harassment lawsuit against Isiah Thomas, the team’s former coach. “People don’t want to put themselves forward with the potential that they could have their head chopped off. It’s a very rare person who is willing to start something without the protection of credibility or success.”
For companies, confronting a sexual harassment allegation is made more difficult if it involves a top executive or an employee responsible for its success.
At Weinstein Co., the company revolved around Harvey Weinstein. Alone among Hollywood executives, Weinstein made his fame and fortune championing unknown filmmakers who often told odd and uncomfortable stories. “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” “Pulp Fiction” and “Good Will Hunting” weren’t just successful films, they helped break the stranglehold that Hollywood’s largest studios had on the industry for decades.
The growth and evolution of independent film, productions not financed by one of the six major studios, owes its success in no small part to Harvey Weinstein. To make it in film, young actors, writers and those eager to get into production often tried to meet and appeal to Weinstein. And the combination was often toxic.
“Whether it’s in media, the financial services industry or a professional industry like a law firm, companies unfortunately protect people who generate significant revenue even if that means letting that person do things that they shouldn’t be doing,” said Doug Wigdor of Wigdor LLP, a lawyer for 23 current and former Fox News employees who have made sexual and racial harassment complaints against the network. “Rather than taking swift, responsive action and sending a message to other people, they turn a blind eye.”
Much attention will be placed in the coming days on what Weinstein Co.’s board of directors knew and when. Similarly, questions are being asked as to what Democrats who accepted campaign donations from Harvey Weinstein knew and whether they took the money anyway.
According to the Times, Weinstein’s ability to continue to harass women was made possible by fears of retaliation. Similar comments were made about the workplace environment at Fox News as well as Uber and MSG Networks Inc., owner of the Knicks. After allegations about senior executives engaging in sexual harassment became public, all three companies took immediate actions to convey to employees that such behavior wouldn’t be tolerated.
At Weinstein Co., the Times detailed how “dozens” of former and current employees knew about Harvey Weinstein’s behavior but chose not to confront him.
“If you have a person who can give someone a lead role, or the power to let someone into the room or go to the party, that’s power,” Vladeck added. “That’s how people use their power. It’s really much more about power than sex.”
Firebombing Rattles Latino Immigrants on New York’s Long Island
Walking by the remains of a firebombed clapboard home that was formerly occupied by a family of Mexican immigrants, Pedro Escorza Vargas shrugs incredulously.
“This was racism,” says Mr. Vargas, a Mexican day laborer. “Most of the people here know we just want to work, but there are some that hate us.”
Just after midnight on July 5, long after local Independence Day firework displays had ended, a flammable device was thrown into a small two-story house in this semi-suburban Long Island town. The house, with a family sleeping inside, was quickly enveloped in flames. Neighbors who heard the blast helped ferry the family out of the home without injury.
Though Suffolk County police initially stopped short of calling the firebombing a “bias crime,” officer Robert Reecks said last week that after more investigation, “it looks like they have been targeted because of who they are.” The FBI has also become involved.
Like other towns that have experienced a sudden influx of immigrants, Farmingville has become a flash point for those angry about the rising presence of nonwhite immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America, but also from Africa, India, China, and other parts of Asia. Although a virulently anti-immigrant group based in Farmingville lost much public support during the past year, the firebombing suggests hostilities haven’t vanished. Indeed, the incident highlights the tensions sometimes produced when a sizable number of immigrants take up residence in places well removed from urban centers.
“How immigrants or any new group is met by those who have lived there for a while depends on the community itself,” says Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks the operations of hate groups nationwide. “Some communities are able to assimilate these people. Some tolerate and even welcome them. Some go in the opposite direction.”
For immigrants and their advocates, the location of the arson attack erased any doubt that the incident was meant to intimidate the 3,000 or so Latino immigrants that live and look for work in the town. Immediately next door to the firebombed house, now boarded up, lies the home once occupied by two Mexican laborers who were nearly killed after being picked up in Farmingville in 2000 by a pair of white supremacists masquerading as contractors. The laborers, both undocumented immigrants, were taken to an abandoned industrial park in a neighboring town and attacked with a pole-hole digger and a knife.
Back then, suspicions fixed on a highly visible anti-immigrant group called the Sachem Quality of Life Organization. However, the pair later convicted of attempted manslaughter and sentenced to 25 years in prison were neither members of Sachem nor residents of Farmingville. Rather, one lived in Queens and the other elsewhere on Long Island.
Ed Person, president of Sachem, flatly states that none of his members had anything to do with this month’s firebombing. He adds, “If the federal and state governments were enforcing the law against these illegal aliens, a lot less of these problems would be going on.”
The furor over undocumented immigrants is a product of Long Island’s geography, which shapes the area’s insular lifestyle, says Charles Funk, who helped form Brookhaven Citizens for Peaceful Solutions, a community group to counter Sachem.
Mexican and Central American immigrants, some with papers but many without, have been gradually but steadily moving to towns and villages on Long Island for more than 20 years. Contractors, eager for cheap labor, have been quick to offer them work.
“Long Island is really very provincial,” Mr. Funk says. It’s a “dead-end island,” he calls it, because to get away by land, drivers must pass through Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx.
Farmingville, pop. 15,000, is a mostly middle-income community of bungalows and ranch houses broken up by strip malls. The town itself is on land that belies its name: Its sandy pine soil and soft hills have never made for easy farming.
In 1998, Sachem began holding public meetings at the local firehouse. They called on politicians to pressure the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport the rising number of men who waited for day-laborer work in front of town convenience stores.
Sachem’s leaders had little trouble attracting 300 or more people at meetings or gathering a few dozen for pickets at day-laborer hiring sites. Police often had to be present to separate Sachem’s members from groups of immigrants.
Through its local cable-television show, “Whose Community Is It Anyway?” Sachem charges that Farmingville’s Latino immigrants have brought crime and congestion to the town while depressing local wages and squeezing town services. Suffolk County police, though, say there has been no increase in crime.
About a year ago, many Sachem members left the group when its newest leaders began aligning more closely with a network of armed militia groups operating in Arizona and Texas. In doing so, Sachem began to publicly embrace the theory that the Mexican government was encouraging emigration to the US as part of a larger plan to retake the southern half of North America.
In June, Chris Simcox, head of the Civil Homeland Defense, a vigilante border group that operates out of Tombstone, Ariz., headlined Sachem’s annual conference, attended by just a handful of people. “Sachem’s radical leadership was overthrown by an even more radical leadership,” says Patrick Young, director of the Central American Refugee Center in Hempstead, Long Island.
Though Sachem was exonerated from the 2000 assault and may have had nothing to do with the recent firebombing, Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, which also tracks hate groups, says the group’s rhetoric fosters a climate of distrust and antipathy that makes bias crimes possible.
“I would say there is very little question that attacks on immigrants are on the rise,” Mr. Potok says.
One former Sachem member, Bill Murphy, a state worker, says he’s not against immigration as long as it’s controlled and legal. Mr. Murphy has since helped start Concerned Residents for a Better Brookhaven. “The vast majority of people in this town favor immigration,” he says – “but legal immigration.”
Will Republican Plans to Lower the Corporate Tax Rate Bring Billions Back to the U.S.?
The Panama Papers has suddenly made taxes a very sexy issue.
The massive leak of documents tied to the Panama law firm of Mossack Fonseca revealed that Chinese and Russian heads-of-state as well as other government leaders have been stashing millions of dollars in shell companies incorporated in the so-called tax haven.
U.S. companies don’t use shell companies to hide their cash from authorities though they do use tax havens such as Panama and the Cayman Islands to shield profits generated abroad from U.S. tax collectors.
At present, U.S. companies hold somewhere between $2 trillion and $3 trillion in cash outside this country. They choose not to repatriate that money because to do so would expose them to a 35% marginal corporate tax rate that applies to revenue generated both within the U.S. and abroad.
Unlike most developed countries, the U.S. tax code, which hasn’t gone through a meaningful overhaul since 1986, taxes foreign revenue at the same rate as domestic sales.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz has called for reducing the effective corporate tax rate to 16% while the New York businessman Donald Trump does him one better, proposing to cut it to 15%. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders have said they’re willing to lower the 35% corporate tax rate, insisting that whatever changes are made to the U.S. tax regimen generate more revenue for the government, not less.
“The debate on this issue, like the debate on many issues, is very exaggerated,”Robert C. Pozen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in a phone interview in New York. “But if you continue to allow people to defer and shovel money into tax havens, they’ll do. You’ve got to deal with the tax haven problem.”
While the parties are far apart on the corporate tax level, they agree something needs to be done to encourage U.S. companies to invest their foreign profits in the U.S.
Sanders argues that U.S. companies should no longer be allowed to defer taxes on foreign profits. The right of deferral is an integral part of current law, allowing multinational corporations to sit on that money indefinitely, susceptible only to local taxes. Sanders says that by ending deferral, U.S. multinationals would have to pay the government around $620 billion.
Of course, ending deferral without setting a lower tax rate for previously generated profits would likely prompt dozens of U.S. corporations to execute “corporate inversions” as Pfizer (PFE – Get Report) did last year when it merged in 2015 with the Irish drug company Allergan Inc. in a $160 billion transaction.
So, how does the U.S. government devise a tax code that encourages repatriation?
The Cruz plan, like those favored by Pozen, would apply a 10% tax on previously generated foreign profits. Going forward, though, Cruz’s 16% tax would cause a revenue shortfall for the government of $8.6 trillion over 10 years, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. Trump’s plan would create a gap of $9.5 trillion, increasing the national debt by 80%, the center estimates.
Neither Trump not Cruz lay out how they’d bridge that gap, and it’s unclear whether they’d even seek to do so. Cruz, for one, has called for eliminating the IRS as well as the departments of education, commerce and energy as well as that of housing and urban development.
“I don’t get the impression that they’re thinking about any offsets for their trillions in tax cuts,” Hunter Blair, budget analyst at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said in a phone interview from Washington. “It’s mostly that they plan to make it up with enormous spending cuts.”
Clinton argues that U.S. corporations use a variety of lenient deductions to pay less taxes their counterparts in Europe and Asia. In recent weeks, her focus has been on preventing companies from using “tax inversion” mergers to relocate outside the U.S.
The former New York senator’s favors an “exit tax” to prevent companies from leaving the U.S. tax system through corporate inversions as Medtronic (MDT – Get Report) did earlier this year when it completed its acquisition of Dublin-based Covidien. Like Clinton, the Economic Policy Institute says that any reform of corporate tax rates should result in a system that is “revenue positive. In other words, generating money that either pays down the deficit or funds programs approved by Congress.
Apple‘s (AAPL – Get Report) CEO Tim Cook has called for reforms that would encourage his company to bring back some of the roughly $74 billion in cash the company holds outside the U.S.
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The argument in favor of cutting the corporate tax rate is that companies would bring money currently stashed in lower-tax countries or tax havens such as Panama or the Cayman Islands back to the United States to invest in factories and new jobs. The conservative Tax Foundation estimates that 425,000 to 613,000 new jobs would be created depending on whether the rate was lowered to 25% or 20%. Wages, the Foundation says, would increase by 1.9% and 3.6%, over the long-term.
Cruz and Trump are equally adamant that cutting the corporate tax rate would unleash a surge of investment by U.S. corporations, building factories and expanding their workforces within the U.S.
Others are less sanguine, arguing that lower taxes aren’t the main reason a company chooses to invest or not, and companies are just as apt to invest in hard assets as they are to use the cash to buy back their own shares. But that hasn’t kept proponents of a rate cut, such as CNBC’s Larry Kudlow from endorsing Trump’s plan while claiming it would “grow the economy…easily pay for itself.”
If the corporate tax rate is cut to 25%, Brookings Institution’s Pozen says, the government would have a shortfall of between $1.2 trillion and $1 trillion over 10 years. Bridging that shortfall will require closing a number of loopholes such as limiting the interest companies can deduct on their debt. Such a reduction could generate around $400 billion over 10 years.
Other loopholes worth closing would probably include those on hedge funds and corporate jets, but Pozen says that would only generate around $100 billion over 10 years.
To further close the shortfall, Republicans and Democrats will likely to establish a compromise rate on the $3 trillion that U.S. companies hold outside the country. Trump has proposed a rate of 10%, which Pozen says would likely be low enough to actually convince companies to move much of that money back to the U.S.
“Now 10% of $3 trillion is real money, it’s $300 billion,” said Pozen, who also serves on Medtronic’s board of directors.
Democrats, meanwhile, want to eliminate the right of corporations to defer paying tax on income generated outside the country. To do that, Republicans will want to establish a new rate on future income generated outside the U.S. That’s important given that U.S. companies currently only pay about 13% of their worldwide income in taxes, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
So, what’s a reasonable corporate rate, and how can that shortfall be bridged?
Pozen proposes a rate of 25% for domestic income, and 17% for foreign income while eliminating the deferral.
However, each company would pay a foreign tax rate depending on where they were located. If the company is based in Ireland, where the rate is 12%, they’d pay just 5% to the U.S. If they’re in the Cayman Islands, which has a zero rate, they’d be required to pay the full 17%.
“With a 17% global rate, we’d start to see a lot of companies and people would be bringing back profits to the U.S.,” Pozen said. “The question is whether you could do it politically, whether people can get serious about this. And right now, who knows?”
Mexican Journalists Shaken After Murder of Publisher Who Reported on Drug Cartels
Rumors fly quickly after an unsolved slaying, so it is little surprise that many here believe the shooting late last month of a columnist for a small weekly newspaper actually was a warning to its high-profile publisher.
The publisher, Jesus Blancornelas, was nearly killed seven years ago when hit men for a drug cartel shot him as he sat in his car. And it was Blancornelas, not the columnist, who wrote most vociferously about alleged connections between the cartel, certain politicians and police departments.
Even though Blancornelas said the June 22 slaying in Tijuana of Francisco Ortiz, a co-founder of the weekly Zeta, will not muzzle him, the shooting was seen as a warning to all Mexican journalists who dare to criticize drug trafficking. They are an increasing number, spurred by a growing ambition among Mexico’s press to investigate corruption and crime.
The slaying “certainly has put us on edge,” said Raul Ruiz Castillo, news director of Frontera, a Tijuana daily. “The situation with drug trafficking has forced us to pull back at times, to be more careful in what we write about and what photos we publish.”
Ortiz, 48, was shot four times after getting into his car. His two children, ages 8 and 10, were in the car but were unhurt.
According to the Inter American Press Association in Miami, Ortiz is the fifth Mexican journalist killed since 2001. All worked for newspapers in border cities. In total, 39 Mexican journalists have been killed in the past 15 years, according to the press association.
Roberto Mora, an editor of El Manana newspaper in Nuevo Laredo, was stabbed to death in March. Human-rights advocates said the killing was likely due to his writing that linked drug traffickers and corrupt officials.
“Drug trafficking has begun to seep into all aspects of life here, and for that reason it’s more difficult to be a journalist on the border than anywhere else in Mexico,” said Jorge Santibanez, president of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana. “Other newspapers report on captures, trials and drug seizures, but Zeta does analysis and investigations that are not typical of most newspapers here or anywhere.”
For much of Zeta’s 24-year history, Blancornelas, 68, and his staff have endured death threats and attacks. The weekly is devoted, in part, to the memory of Blancornelas’ close friend and Zeta co-founder, Hector Felix Miranda, who was killed in 1988 by masked gunmen.
Ortiz recently had joined a task force with members of the Mexican government and the Inter American Press Association, a non-profit organization that works on press issues throughout the Americas. The task force was due to reopen an investigation into Felix Miranda’s death. It also was to investigate the 1991 fatal stabbing of Victor Manuel Oropeza, a columnist for the Diario de Juarez.
Since the Felix Miranda killing, Zeta has published numerous articles alleging that the slaying was ordered by Jorge Hank Rhon, a Tijuana businessman whose father was among the most powerful in the 71-year reign of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Hank Rhon, the PRI candidate for mayor of Tijuana, has repeatedly denied any involvement in either the Felix Miranda or Ortiz slayings.
Zeta is known throughout Mexico’s journalism community as a trailblazer.
“For many years, Zeta was the only newspaper writing about corruption and drug money among the police and judicial system,” said Ricardo Trotti, director of the Inter American Press Association. “There is a special situation on the Mexican side of the border . . . where mafias have great power and doing journalism becomes very risky.”
But within Mexico’s evolving press, Blancornelas and his staff have also made adversaries among competing publications that view the 48-page tabloid as prone to yellow journalism.
“Zeta has done a lot of important work, and for that they should be applauded,” said Dora Elena Cortes, a longtime city reporter for the national newspaper El Universal, who recently launched an independent news agency. “But Zeta’s view is they do good work and the rest of the press is corrupt. Well, Mexico’s press is changing. There are more editors and reporters now who are writing about drug trafficking and government corruption.”
Blancornelas and Felix Miranda launched a weekly, ABC, in 1977 and soon were threatened with arrest after writing that the Baja California state government was riddled with corruption. To avoid prison, both men fled to San Diego.
In 1980 the allegations against them were dropped, and they revived the weekly as Zeta, for the last letter of the Spanish alphabet.
Soon afterward, they returned to Tijuana. But Zeta was never embraced by the rest of the local or national press.
“They don’t practice quality journalism with attributed sources, etc., but Zeta has become a symbol of committed journalism, and that’s important for Mexico,” Trotti said.
The development of a more independent and critical press in Mexico has largely been pushed by cataclysmic social events. The 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, the 1994 Zapatista uprising and the 1995 peso crash prompted journalists to look harder at their government and how public money was spent.
The defeat four years ago of PRI also reinforced journalists’ aspirations. Now, Trotti said, such papers as Monterrey’s El Norte and its Mexico City sister publication, Reforma, are training their reporters to go well beyond copying government press releases.
Tijuana’s Frontera, part of a chain of northwestern Mexican dailies owned by Healy Media Inc., is another example of newspapers criticizing local affairs and supporting themselves through non-government advertising, Trotti said.
Diana Washington Valdez, a reporter for Texas’ El Paso Times, has spent much of her career working alongside Mexican journalists. For years, she wondered why her colleagues weren’t more aggressive.
But in the course of covering the dozens of unsolved murders of young women across the border in Ciudad Juarez, Valdez said she began to empathize with the problems confronted by Mexican reporters who dare to delve into the impact of drug money and organized crime.
“They live and work under very different conditions that can be very dangerous,” said Valdez, who recently completed a book on the murders called “Harvest of Women: A Mexican Safari.”
“When it comes to writing about the women’s murders, perhaps we’re in a better position to do it.”
One Mexican newspaper that accused government and police officials of not properly investigating the murders is Norte de Ciudad Juarez.
Alfredo Quijano, editor of the 25,000-circulation daily, said he and his reporters often receive threats by telephone, in the mail or on the street.
They also are often hauled into court to answer police questions about articles they have written.
“We not only have to deal with pressure from drug traffickers but also pressure from the government and the police,” Quijano said. “This is something that happens all up and down the border.”
Since the Ortiz murder, Blancornelas has all but gone into hiding, refusing to speak with journalists. Outside the newspaper’s offices, located in a house in a middle-class neighborhood, a dozen men, some carrying automatic rifles, stand guard.
Blancornelas never goes anywhere without them.
In Florida, Puerto Rico’s Economic Pain Could Be Democrats’ Electoral Gain
Call it the Puerto Rico ripple effect.
The island’s default this week on $174 million in bonds serves as an exclamation point to a multi-year migration that has fueled the growth of Florida’s Puerto Rican population to more than a million.
As a result, the ongoing financial crisis on the island of 3.5 million could help tip the balance toward the Democrats in the crucial swing state of Florida when voters go to the polls in November to elect the next U.S. president.
The influx from the island — estimated at 800 to 1,000 families per month — is strengthening the stature of Democrat-leaning Latinos in the Orlando area, remaking the state’s Latino electorate map that has historically tilted to Cuban Republicans in Miami.
“We’re really seen an acceleration in this migration,” said Mark Lopez, director of Hispanic research at the Pew Research Center in Washington. “This isn’t just an out-migration of the most-educated or even the poorest Puerto Ricans — its people of working age who are leaving to find jobs.”
What had been a small community of Puerto Ricans in and around three counties in central Florida — Osceola, Orange and Seminole — has mushroomed, bolstered by the relocation of Puerto Rican nationals from Democratic strongholds in the Northeast and Chicago, drawn to Orlando for jobs in hospitality, or to retire, Lopez added.
Yet unlike other fast-growing Latino communities in central Florida, such as Colombians, Puerto Ricans moving to Florida arrive as U.S. citizens. Registering to vote is as simple as proving local residency. And while Puerto Ricans living on the island aren’t allowed to vote in U.S. presidential elections, they can do so if they relocate to one of the 50 states.
“This is their first opportunity to vote for president, and that’s really important to them,” Soraya Marquez, statewide coordinator of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino-focused voter registration organization, said in a phone interview from Orlando. Puerto Ricans accounted for 48% of voter registrations made by Mi Familia Vota statewide in 2015.
The backdrop for this demographic overhaul is Puerto Rico, a U.S. commonwealth that has seen its monetary problems steadily worsened since 2006, when decades of special tax breaks and economic incentives were phased-out. Those tax breaks and incentives served as the engine behind Puerto Rico’s post-World War II boom when dozens of U.S. pharmaceutical, textile and other manufacturing companies opened facilities on the island.
Yet, as its economy began to slow some 10 years ago, Puerto Rican officeholders turned to Wall Street for financing even as it neglected calls to reform tax collection and fight corruption. More than three years of bitter negotiations with creditors owed some $72 billion has forced layoffs in manufacturing as well as in government, which accounts for about one-fourth of the total workforce, according to Bloomberg.
And while the island’s financial problems were the focus of recent trips to Puerto Rico by Florida Senator and Republican presidential contender Marco Rubio as well as Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, both likely had their sights set on Florida.
And for good reason.
Four years ago, Barack Obama narrowly defeated Mitt Romney in the state by a vote of 50% to 49.1%. Since then, both Democrats and Republicans have actively courted the area’s Puerto Rican voters as well as a collection of immigrant communities from Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Central America that accounts for about 35% of Latinos in the three counties. But the two parties have had differing success.
Between 2006 and 2014, Hispanic voter registration in the state climbed by 56%. But while the number of Hispanics registering as Democrats, or indicating no party affiliation, jumped by about 80% during that time, Latinos identifying as Republican increased just 14%. Much of that jump took place in central Florida; but, even in Miami, Hispanics registering as Democrat grew 66%, while Republicans rolls were roughly flat, according to the Pew Research Center.
In Orlando, that’s led to a fourth term for Democratic Mayor Buddy Dyer, and the convincing re-election of liberal Congressman Alan Grayson in 2014.
Nonetheless, Republicans have had some success as well. Two Republican state legislators from central Florida are Puerto Rican to go along with three Democrats. Democratic State Senator Darren Soto is running to be Florida’s first congressman of Puerto Rican ancestry as Grayson frees up his seat to run for the U.S. senate office that Rubio is vacating.
“Democrats are doing much better generally in central Florida than they have in the past,” Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist, said in a phone interview from Orlando. “It’s had an impact and that impact looks likely to grow as Puerto Ricans become a bigger part of the population.”
As of November, there were 11.9 million registered voters in Florida, with Democrats holding a 38% to 35% lead over Republicans. Some 2.6 million of them are Latino. Shifting demographics has shrunken Miami’s Cuban community to 30% of the state’s Latino population, from 50% in 2000, while the population of Puerto Ricans, mostly in central Florida, has risen to about 29%.
“Here in central Florida, you’ve already seen Orange County go from ruby red 20 years ago to deep blue today,” said Jose Fernandez, an Orlando businessman who served as chief of staff to Dyer from 2003 to 2007. “That’s a result of the changing demographics, and the difficulties Puerto Rico has had financially.”
These changes could bolster the Democratic presidential nominee’s chances of winning Florida’s 29 electoral votes, even if Rubio or former Governor Jeb Bush captures the Republican nomination, Fernandez said.
Jeb Bush, who is married to a Mexican and speaks Spanish, had success with Latinos in central Florida, Fernandez said. But since Bush left the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee, his profile in state politics has been much reduced. Rubio, though popular in south Florida, carries less stature in Orlando, owing to political rivalries between Puerto Ricans and Cubans.
Whichever party can reach the most Puerto Ricans on the issue of immigration could have an advantage. Sensitives around the issue remain high.
“Puerto Ricans pay attention to immigration even though it doesn’t impact them directly,” said Fernandez, 45, who emigrated from Nicaragua when he was eight. “That’s because of the racial tone, and to some extent, the discriminatory tone. Yes, being a U.S. citizen is different than being an immigrant, but there’s a sense that these comments are pointed at all Latinos.”
For Puerto Ricans, voting in a presidential election also means potentially influencing how policymakers in Washington might address the island’s needs.
Puerto Rican voter participation is also heightened by a tradition of roughly 90% turnout for the island’s gubernatorial elections, which are held on Sundays, Marquez said.
“The challenge for us is getting Puerto Ricans to vote as much in U.S. elections as they used to do in Puerto Rico,” Marquez said. “Because what happens in central Florida depends on whether Puerto Ricans vote.”
Is Ted Cruz Right that Immigration Drives Down Wages?
Immigration to the U.S. is an “economic calamity,” according to Ted Cruz — but only if it happens to you.
That’s the image Texas Senator Ted Cruz painted this week at the Republican’s fifth presidential debate: immigrants driving down the wages of U.S. citizens. But the public wouldn’t know that, argued the son of Cuban immigrants, because the media won’t report on it. Why? Because Cruz says it’s not happening to news reporters:
“If a bunch of people with journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press, then we would see stories about the economic calamity that is befalling our nation,” he said, after saying the politics of the issue would be different if “lawyers” and “bankers” were “crossing the Rio Grande.”
Conservatives loved that zinger — poking fun at the media is a surefire path to applause. But there’s one problem: It’s misleading, and many not be true.
Over the past 30 years, cities and towns across the country, especially smaller cities and rural areas, have been remade by an influx of foreign-born workers. It’s not uncommon to find states as disparate as North Carolina, Iowa and Oregon with large immigrant populations. The population of Louisville, Ky., for instance, would have fallen in recent years had it not been for an influx of immigrants.
There were more than 40 million immigrants in the U.S. as of 2012. Of those, 11.7 million are undocumented, according to the left-leaning New York-based Economic Policy Institute. Newer immigrants, especially the undocumented, tend to take low-skilled jobs that don’t compete with native-born workers because such jobs — agriculture, landscaping, car washing — don’t require them to interact with customers, according to a December 2014 study from the conservative Manhattan Institute.
Cruz’s argument implies that an influx of low-skilled workers cripples local municipalities, driving down wages for locals and having a deflationary effect on regional economies. But researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research in an April 2015 study of U.S. Census data from 1980 to 2000 found that the overall impact was the opposite. That, over time, such regional economies grow as their populations expand and immigrants become consumers as well as workers.
“In general equilibrium, immigrants will affect not only labor supply, but also labor demand,” said the Bureau’s study. “Local real wages can rise as a result of immigration, even in a model where native-born and immigrant labor are perfect substitutes.” On average, each immigrant was found to generate 1.2 local lobs for local workers, with most of those going to native-born workers.
In fact, when it comes to immigrants taking jobs, the most at-risk population is previous immigrants, according to a survey of population data between 1994 and 2007 by the Economic Policy Institute. That’s because they work in jobs for which they can be easily substituted, and newer immigrants may be willing to work for even lower wages.
“For native-born workers, the effects [of immigration] tend to be very small, and on average, modestly positive,” the Institute said.
Native-born, low-skilled laborers often, though not always, take different kinds of jobs than immigrant workers. As opposed to working in agriculture and food service, they tend to take positions as security guards or funeral service workers, the Manhattan Institute’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth wrote in the December 2014 study cited above.
And what of those higher-skilled workers Cruz highlighted at the debate?
The same goes for these kinds of workers, who tend to be concentrated in scientific research or computer engineering versus law, banking or even journalism, as Cruz argued. Immigrants in these areas largely expand the workforce rather than cannibalize it.
“Both high- and low-skill immigration, on net, boost economic growth,” reads the Manhattan Institute’s 2014 study. “It expands America’s workforce and encourages more business start-ups [and] because immigrants’ educational backgrounds typically complement, rather than displace, the skills of the native-born labor market, immigration increases economic efficiency by supplying more labor to low- and high-skill markets.”
The libertarian Cato Institute sees similar patterns.
“Nowhere will you find a tradeoff where one additional immigrant means that one American loses a job in the economy,” said Cato’s Alex Nowrasteh. “Immigrants either lower the wages of some American workers by about 2% or raise them by about 2% in a dynamic economy.”
Cruz’s zero-sum portrait of immigrants fails to understand the dynamics of an economy that expands and specializes over time.
A Congressional Budget Office study analyzing the comprehensive 2013 Immigration Modernization Act (that Florida Senator Marco Rubio helped write and then kill) showed that “average wages for the entire labor force would be 0.1% lower in 2023 and 0.5% higher in 2033 due to the effects of the bill if passed.
That’s a broad view based on legislation that may or may not be adopted. Whoever becomes the next U.S. president will likely have to grapple with the dynamics of local and regional economies that are ever-evolving.
Such a picture, though, may not be as politically useful in a contentious primary race as a portrait of bankers, lawyers and journalists surging into the U.S. from its southern border.
Mexico Criticized for Treatment of Central American Refugees
TECUN UMAN, GUATEMALA — When Jose Ramon Aviles left his native Honduras to look for a job in the United States, he never expected to be nabbed by migration police in Mexico.
Standing in a park near the Mexican border, Mr. Aviles says he was roughed up by the police, stripped of his money ($65), and left in a jail for three days without food. “The police are criminals,” he said.
At a time when Mexico’s new president, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, is vigorously protesting California’s anti-immigrant Proposition 187 and calling for improved treatment of undocumented Mexican immigrants as well as Central and South Americans, Mexican community leaders are complaining just as angrily about mistreatment and discrimination within Mexico.
Bishop Jorge Arizmendi of Tapachula, Mexico, a city of about 300,000 just 15 miles north of the seedy crossroads of Tecun Uman, says that human rights violations against undocumented Central and South Americans has long been the status quo along the country’s often-forgotten southern border.
A month ago, Bishop Arizmendi and other southern Mexico clergymen had a chance to privately press their concerns with tZedillo, who was then president-elect. A few days later, during a stopover in Guatemala City, Zedillo pledged to upgrade the treatment of undocumented Central American immigrants.
So far, though, Arizmendi reports only a stepped-up presence of immigration police and roadblocks. Many presume the increase is a result of US government pressure stemming from Prop. 187 to stem the flow of illegals. A US government official denied any connection. “Just as our government is demanding the protection of human rights for the Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States, we must do the same here,” says Arizmendi. “It simply must be said: the undocumented have no rights under Mexican law.”
Arizmendi hopes Zedillo’s outspoken criticism of the controversial California proposition, which limits availability of social services to undocumented workers, will pressure Mexico’s government to examine its own rough treatment of undocumented immigrants.
Government officials, though, have preferred to keep public focus on their northern border. In recent years, Mexico has pointed to the 40,000 Guatemalans living in camps for political refugees in the state of Campeche as proof of its respect for immigrants.
But with wars in Central America officially over, fewer refugees are able to get an immigration hearing. Deportations have risen from 90,000 in 1990 to more than 143,000 in 1993, according to the National Migration Institute in Mexico City.
Thumbing a ride
In hot and humid Tecun Uman, the hundreds of Central Americans and even occasional Chinese and Egyptians hanging around for a shot at a northbound ride are mostly migrants seeking a better wage.
Although few aim to work in Mexico, many find themselves in jails or held over in cities such as Tapachula contemplating their next move. And while Mexican law champions human rights and guarantees education and medical services, human rights advocates say police and government authorities are uncooperative.
“There is often a gap between what is written in the law and what the reality is on the ground – particularly in far-flung places like Chiapas,” says Bill Frelick, director of the Washington D.C.-based US Committee for Refugees.
While a public education is guaranteed for every child regardless of citizenship, schools require a birth certificate or a passport and visa. But few immigrants hold such documents and are commonly turned away. Medical care, too, requires similar documentation. Like undocumented Mexicans working on California farms, Guatemalan and Honduran farm hands can similarly triple their wages by landing work in northern Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa. But once there, workers complain of having to accept sub-minimum pay, excessive hours, and poor housing. “This is a terrible injustice that must change,” says Oswaldo Valdemar Cuevas, Guatemalan consul in Tapachula.
But change is not on the horizon. Since Zedillo has made opposition to Prop. 187 a high priority, raising the issue at the recent Americas Summit in Miami, drawing attention to Mexico’s own deficiencies is unlikely.
“People say that with [Prop.] 187, Mexicans in California will be denied basic services and discrimination will be rampant,” says Celso Lopez, editor of Tapachula’s newspaper, Diario del Sur. “But that’s what’s been happening here for years.”
Suburbia in Decline as Young People Struggle to Find Affordable Housing
LEVITTOWN, N.Y. — More than 50 years ago, World War II veterans and their families swarmed to Long Island for the single-family homes and green lawns of a new, affordable, middle-class dreamland called suburbia. These days many of their grandchildren can no longer afford to live there.
With census figures showing the number of 18- to 34-year-olds on Long Island down 20 percent from 1990 to 2000, employers worry about a shrinking labor force, politicians fret about a declining tax base and residents debate how much change they’re willing to consider to stanch the population hemorrhage.
While Forman said the decline in young people was also from a 1970s drop in the birth rate, he acknowledged that Long Island’s historic aversion to housing other than single-family homes has made it difficult for young workers to remain in the area. Leaders of the island’s two counties, Nassau and Suffolk, are pushing local towns to approve moderately priced apartment and townhouse projects.
“There is a greater inclination to hear about proposals such as affordable housing, but if development is viewed as threatening those things people embrace as suburbia, these projects aren’t going anywhere,” said Seth Forman, deputy director of the Long Island Regional Planning Board.
Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi said if first-time buyers can’t easily enter the Long Island housing market, the “brain drain” will intensify and the tax base for Long Island’s 2.8 million residents will shrink, forcing cuts in the public services that sustain suburbia’s quality of life.
“Our population is stagnant because there’s no new housing — we’re not growing,” said Suozzi, who has championed a series of development projects he calls New Suburbia. “We could face a tipping point where the high quality of life that we have in Long Island will come to resemble the death of the cities that we went through in the 1970s.”
Other older suburbs around the country, notably California’s Orange County and Silicon Valley, also are wrestling with a housing crunch that is pushing out younger workers.
Help for Long Island may come in a new bill proposed by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), that would provide $250 million in federal grants and tax credits for revitalization projects aimed at the nation’s aging suburbs.
But the situation in Long Island is exacerbated by its proximity to New York City’s expensive housing market and the geographical limitations of being surrounded by water, said Bruce Katz, a metropolitan policy analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Compounding matters, wages on Long Island, where about 75 percent of local residents work, have grown by 8 percent over the last 15 years, compared with 12 percent nationally, Katz said.
Meanwhile, the price of homes on Long Island has more than doubled in the past six years, according to the Long Island Board of Realtors. As of July 2004, the median price of a single-family home on Long Island was $393,000, more than twice the national average.
“It’s great for existing homeowners, but if workers can’t afford to live there, they’ll go elsewhere,” Katz said.
In Levittown, which calls itself the birthplace of suburbia, Elizabeth Fenichel, 25, lives with her parents while studying for a master’s degree in elementary education.
On a recent trip to southern Pennsylvania where she attended college, Fenichel visited two friends who had recently purchased a house.
“I couldn’t believe the amount of space they had for the money they paid,” she said. “I would love to live in Long Island, but it’s just so expensive.”
Fenichel grew up in a renovated Levitt home, one of the original Cape Cods erected and sold by the developer William Levitt for $8,000.
Levitt built 17,450 of these cookie-cutter homes in central Long Island from 1947 to 1951. Since then, planned neighborhoods like Levittown evolved into part of the sprawl regularly derided by proponents of so-called “smart growth.”
Eric Alexander, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Long Island Vision, encourages towns to build “smart growth” office space with adjacent apartment housing, restaurants and retail shops.
As for young people, Alexander said that when they decide where to live, factors other than housing are considered.
“Not everyone is looking right away for a bedroom community with a good school district and a park with a swing set,” he said. “We think people are also leaving Long Island for lifestyle reasons.”
But lifestyle means different things to different people.
Owing to local control ordinances enacted in the early days of Long Island’s suburban boom, all of the island’s communities — two cities, 13 towns and 95 villages — have their own zoning boards.
For years, these boards staunchly opposed rental apartments and other multifamily dwellings, fearing an influx of low-income workers and minorities, said James Larocca, a public policy professor at Southampton College in eastern Long Island.
“Local control of land-use decisions is one of the most cherished features of Long Island,” Larocca said.
But although regional planning was eschewed, most towns unified in their opposition to rental units.
According to the Long Island Index, an annual study by the Rauch Foundation, 20 percent of Long Island residents live in rental housing, compared with 33 percent nationwide.
Nonetheless, Forman estimates there are more than 100,000 “illegal” rental units in the two counties, equal to about 10 percent of the total housing stock.
Students at Long Island’s many colleges commonly rent an “illegal” apartment, usually an attached room or basement unit in a single-family home.
On the campus of Stony Brook University on Long Island’s north shore, David DeTurris, 29, a senior who grew up on the island, said basement apartments can run as high as $750 a month, requiring two students to share the space.
Suozzi and Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, both Democrats, share a preference for “smart growth,” a sharp contrast from the planning policies favored by Republican county executives who dominated the region’s governments for decades.
Both, though, are careful to avoid using the term “affordable housing.” They prefer “work-force housing” and “next generation housing,” terms less likely to conjure up images of low-income, high-rise city buildings.
Regardless of the name given such projects, Edward Mangano, a Republican member of the Nassau County legislature, argues that such new developments would strain local services, including school districts and fire departments.
“It’s important that we preserve suburbia and don’t rush to create developments that don’t complement the community,” he said. “We can’t just rush into this because it’s the politically correct buzzword of the day.”
A high-profile battle is brewing in Mangano’s hometown of Bethpage, where Nassau County officials are trying to win approval for a project that proposes a residential housing, office, retail and recreational complex on a 105-acre site previously owned by aerospace manufacturer Northrop Grumman Corp.
Phil Teel, director of Grumman’s Long Island operations, said the project would help recruit skilled technicians from outside the region as well as retain employees with five or more years of experience.
“This is a regional problem, and for that reason we need a regional focus rather than a town-by-town focus,” Teel said. “If large numbers of young people leave Long Island, our workforce will age and we simply won’t be able to stay competitive.”
Why Donald Trump Can Keep Using Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’
When Jackson Browne sued John McCain in 2008 for using his hit song Running on Empty in a campaign video, he was making a stand for musicians and songwriters who have long complained that politicians shouldn’t be allowed to use their copyrighted material without direct permission.
That Browne, a longtime liberal activist with a particular interest in environmental issues, called out McCain, the conservative Arizona senator who had backed the Iraq invasion, was also part of the story. Citing federal trademark law, Browne argued that McCain’s use of his song falsely implied an endorsement from the singer/songerwriter.
Ultimately, Browne’s case was strengthened by the fact that Running on Empty was used in a McCain campaign video produced by the Ohio Republican Party. The unauthorized reproduction of the song crossed a thick legal line. McCain’s lawyers were told by a judge that if Browne’s case were to go to court, he’d probably lose.
In July 2009, the Arizona senator agreed to an out-of-court settlement.
Flash forward to last week in Cleveland when Donald Trump strode triumphantly onto the stage at the Republican National Convention to the music of Queen’s glorious anthem We Are the Champions. Immediately afterward, Queen’s remaining band members tweeted that they objected to the Republican Party’s use of the song, written by Freddie Mercury, who was gay and died in 1991 at age 45.
As with McCain, Trump hadn’t directly paid Queen or asked the band for permission to use Champions at the convention. But then again, he didn’t have to.
Political campaigns often play songs at rallies after paying a performance rights organization such as the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers a fee to publicly air any song in their library. ASCAP represents more than 10 million musical works from more than 575,000 composers, songwriters, lyricists and music publishers.
A collective license from ASCAP requires a relatively small payment each time a song is played and precludes a campaign or venue such as Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena from having to pay an individual musician or songwriter for the use of their song.
“If the RNC or Quicken Loans had a license, which they did, then technically they’re covered under the public performance license,” said Andrew Sparkler, an attorney at Downtown Music Publishing, which represents artists in technology and copyright issues. “As long as there’s that license, that covers it.”
Or does it?
William Hochberg, a media lawyer at Los Angeles law firm Greenberg Glusker, counters that when it comes to a candidate’s political rally, a song such as We Are The Champions is playing a greater role in that event than, say, background music at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.
After all, this is politics, Hochberg said, and listeners could equate Trump’s use of We Are the Champions or McCain’s use of Running on Empty with a tacit endorsement or loose affiliation between artist and politician.
“They’re going to say, ‘We have the license, we didn’t exceed the scope,'” Hochberg said. “But the artist can say: ‘You put together a program that included our song. That’s not ambient, that’s a very important part of how you’re trying to portray your candidate.'”
On that note, a group of artists — Usher, Sheryl Crow, John Mellencamp and Heart’s Wilson sisters — put together a charmingly acerbic counterattack against politicians that use their songs without their personal approval. Sung to the tune of We Are the World, the video of Don’t Use Our Songsbecame the focus of a typically searing segment on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on Time Warner‘s (TWX) HBO.
The video’s underlying message, Hochberg said, speaks to the unique qualities of music, and in the age of the Internet, the pervasive assumption that music isn’t a piece of property in the same way as a car, a computer or even a film. Usher, Crow and company argue that the artist alone should be able to decide whether their works are associated with a political candidate.
“This is an abuse,” Hochberg added. “Using music to get a lot of punch, and a lot of bang for no bucks, that’s what’s going on here.”
Trump also has used the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil and R.E.M.’s It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) at his rallies, proving he may have a very lively sense of humor. Both the Stones and R.E.M. have told him not to. (Heart made clear it didn’t like Sarah Palin using their song Barracuda when she ran with McCain in 2008 on the Republican ticket.)
The backlash by musicians speaks to the blurriness of music rights. While copyright law allows for general use of a song, musicians have gone to court citing the Lanham Act, better known as the Trademark Act of 1946, which prevents false endorsement. But courts have differed in their application of Lanham, leaving no clear definition as to what constitutes unfair use.
Often candidates don’t want the bad publicity of a musician objecting to their song use, as when Isaac Hayes put the kibosh on Bob Dole’s use of Soul Man in 1996, or David Byrne doing the same to Florida’s Charlie Crist in 2010 over his use of Road to Nowhere. In both cases, the candidates agreed to stop using the songs, and in Crist’s case he made an undisclosed paymentto Byrne.
Trump, in effect, is using the same lack of clarity in the law that YouTube owner Alphabet (GOOG– Get Report) asserts to dodge criticism that it isn’t sufficiently paying artists to use their songs, especially when those songs are posted by third parties.
The pushback by artists comes as musicians continue to pressure businesses such as YouTube for a greater share of the money they generate from their music. But in both cases, Downtown Music’s Sparkler said, politicians and streaming platforms have come to view music as being free of charge.
“People think of music as different from physical property — they think of it as ephemeral, as something they’re entitled to,” he said. “Unfortunately, there is a thread here, a loose ideological thread between a permissiveness to use these songs however anyone wants and a permissiveness by YouTube and others to pay whatever it wants to use the music. Right now, that’s how things are.”
How Trump’s Targeting of High-Tech Immigrants Damages the Economy
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump often decried immigration as an assault on U.S. workers, public safety and the national character. Though working-class immigrants received the bulk of the Republican’s ire, foreign-born employees working at U.S. tech companies didn’t go unnoticed.
“I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program,” Trump said in a statement posted on his campaign’s website. “No exceptions.”
If a leaked White House memo is any indication, President Trump appears poised to issue an executive order that could make it much harder for U.S. companies to hire skilled workers from abroad. High-tech companies have used the H-1B program for years, helping prospective non-U.S. citizen employees obtain one of the roughly 85,000 visas distributed annually by the Department of Homeland Security.
The leaked memo written by Andrew Bremberg, director of Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, is short on specifics but long on the type of broadsides that peppered Trump’s presidential campaign. (A White House spokesman, in an e-mail, wouldn’t confirm or deny the leaked memo, adding only that for the administration, reforming its “broken immigration system is a top priority.”)
The draft executive order lays out steps to “restore the integrity of employment-based nonimmigrant worker programs,” specifically the H-1B visa program. It emphasizes that “officials administer our laws in a manner that prioritizes the interests of American workers and — to the maximum degree possible — the jobs, wages and well-being of those workers.”
The memo seems to be saying that each time a U.S. company hires a non-U.S. citizen to work in the country, he or she is taking a job away from an American worker. And that’s been a criticism of the program for a while.
But such an analysis assumes a zero-sum game, argues William Kerr, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied the impact of immigration on U.S. innovation for the better part of the past decade. The economics of the program aren’t so simple.
Immigrants, Kerr’s research found, make up 15% of the U.S. workforce yet account for 25% of its entrepreneurs, that is, people defined as the first three wage earners in a new business. In other words, high-tech, highly trained engineers and computer programmers also start companies, using an infrastructure of funding and specialists often unavailable in their home countries.
And that figure is steadily rising. Back in the mid-1990s, immigrants accounted for 17% of entrepreneurs.
In more recent years, Kerr found, 35% to 40% of new companies include at least one immigrant entrepreneur. And although companies created by immigrants close at a faster rate than those formed by the native born, those that do succeed for at least six years grow at a faster pace when judged by total employment and payroll.
“U.S. science and engineering, innovation, entrepreneurship have deep connections to the immigration of skilled people to the United States,” Kerr told TheStreet. “Since a lot of our inventors are foreign-born, this program has a disproportionate impact on the size of that workforce and therefore can have serious consequences for U.S. innovation.”
To be sure, the program isn’t without faults or abuses. Critics have long maintained that U.S. companies prefer H-1B visa workers because they can pay them less or fire them more easily.
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the Democratic whip, reintroduced legislation this month that would give preference to those who have earned an advanced degree from a U.S. university, have secured a job offer and have a recognized unique skill.
Where the #NeverTrump Campaign Went Wrong
The #NeverTrump campaign to stop the New York businessman from becoming the Republican nominee for the presidency isn’t hurting his chances — just his ego.
Donald Trump said as much Tuesday in Florida, recounting how televisions showing negative ads aimed at his candidacy played as he spent time with other businessmen last month at his Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami.
“I’m with all these wonderful people from Cadillac, all these top executives, and I’m telling them, ‘Look over there! Don’t watch it! You don’t want to watch it!’ … And they came in waves, one after another and another and it was brutal,” he said of the ads. “What a disaster.”
While obviously embarrassing, a “disaster” it was not.
Trump’s comments followed a convincing victory in the Florida Republican primary, taking all of its 99 delegates, and vanquishing Senator Marco Rubio, who ended his campaign after a loss that could only be described as humiliating.
The ads may have dented Trump’s huge ego but they did little to sway the electorate in the sunshine state, where Trump won nearly 46% of the vote to Rubio’s 27%.
The #NeverTrump campaign is the combined efforts of several powerful Super PACs and a loose coalition of conservative and moderate Republicans who are doing everything they can to prevent Trump from reaching July’s Republican National Convention with the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the GOP nomination.
Over the past several weeks, #NeverTrump has spent some $13 million in anti-Trump television advertising. Ever since Super Tuesday two weeks ago, anti-Trump ads comprised an increasingly large portion of Republican political advertising television, especially in Florida. On Monday, those negative spots accounted for the majority of all Republican TV ads, said Elizabether Wilner, a senior vice president at Kantar Media/CMAG, which tracks TV advertising.
One particularly striking ad highlighted Trump’s ugly views toward women.
The widely-viewed TV ad was produced by Our Principles PAC, headed by former Mitt Romney campaign strategist Katie Packer. The ad features women reciting a slew of ugly negative comments Trump has made about women. The Our Principles Super PAC ad became a popular focus on Twitter, underscoring the urgency that some Republicans feel about stopping Trump. But it may have come too late, according to Wilner.
“You do have to wonder since all of those polls have been out there for a while, where was that ad two weeks ago,” Wilner said. “Ever since the morning after Super Tuesday, you’ve seen the consternation exponentially growing among Republicans, that ‘oh my gosh, he could actually be our nominee.'”
Our Principles PAC was joined by the American Future Fund and Club for Growth Action, the electoral arm of the anti-tax group, and Marco Rubio’s Conservative Solutions PAC in the hope that Rubio could upset Trump in Florida and deliver a serious blow to his presidential aspirations.
Meanwhile, in Ohio…
Politics can make for odd bedfellows, and for one night, conservative Republicans were thanking the relatively moderate Ohio Governor John Kasich.
Kasich’s convincing victory in the Ohio primary handed him 66 delegates and prevented Trump from capturing the winner-take-all state on a night when he also won in Florida, Illinois and North Carolina. A win in Ohio would have all but secured Trump the nomination.
As opposed to the disheartening loss in Florida, the #NeverTrump campaign has pointed to Kasich’s victory in the Ohio primary as critical to ensuring Trump won’t win the nomination, at least not prior to the Republican convention in Cleveland in July.
And there goes @realDonaldTrump path to 1,237. Congrats to team @JohnKasich on an important win. https://t.co/9wfTz0XLvn— Katie Packer (@katiepack) March 16, 2016
The clamor for Kasich comes after he has been widely panned by many Republicans for having expanded Medicaid in Ohio through Obama’s Affordable Care Act and supporting the federal government’s Common Core education standards, among other positions seen as too liberal.
But the Ohio governor was able to accomplish what Rubio failed to do in his home state: Beat Trump in a large state primary.
With Rubio dropping out of the race, Republican activists were heartened that the field of candidates would drop to three, providing Cruz and Kasich more opportunities to face off head-to-head against Trump.
Thwarting the Will of Republican Voters
Over halfway though the primary season, Trump’s victories in large Southern and Midwest states on Tuesday showed that his campaign continues to channel a groundswell of conservative voter frustration aimed at Washington politicians and party leaders.
Trump’s ascendancy, said Christine Toretti, a member of the Republican National Committee, should be viewed as the bi-product of more than 15 years of Republican voters feeling as though they were being snubbed or ignored by officeholders in Washington. Never Trump advertisements expressly telling them not to vote for their guy, may have emboldened them to do the opposite.
“These are people who really want this man, who believe him,” Toretti, who runs a consulting firm for women politicians and CEOs, said in a phone interview near her home in Indiana, Pa. “And now the NeverTrump people, whoever that might be, are trying to manipulate and undermine them, and that’s only going to get them madder.”
Since announcing his candidacy in June, Trump has been able to capitalize on the failure of Republicans in Washington to accomplish any number of goals dear to the hearts of conservatives, added David Harsanyi, senior editor at The Federalist.
At the top of that list is overturning President Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Common Core education standards, preventing same-sex marriages and deporting immigrants who entered or have remained in the country illegally. He’s also won support charging that trade agreements with China and Mexico have cost U.S. workers their jobs, or should be blamed for stagnating wages.
“On the Right, a lot of people in the Tea Party feel like they’re voting for the right people but nothing ever gets done,” Harsanyi said. “The Establishment is really at fault for making a lot of promises they can’t keep. We’re going to overturn Obamacare, etc. Expectations get very high and voters get mad when you don’t meet them.”
Perhaps the best strategy the #NeverTrump campaign could employ is to go back in time and have GOP elected officials deliver on their promises.
Trump’s Weaknesses
Trump’s candidacy isn’t without weaknesses.
His support has remained around 35% of the Republican electorate, a vulnerability considering that no one has won the party’s nomination in the modern era with less that 40% of the popular vote in primaries, according to a report by party strategists Adrian Gray of AGC Research, Alex Lundry of Deep Root Analytics and Patrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights.
Trump has also performed worse in state contests that didn’t allow voters not already registered as Republican. An indication that he could do poorly in so-called “closed” primaries and caucuses that account for a majority of the remaining delegate count.
“Overall, the areas that have yet to vote are more demographically problematic for Trump than the places that have cast their ballots,” said the Republican strategists, who predicted he will fall just short of the threshold needed for the nomination. “The remaining states are more diverse, better educated and hold higher median incomes.”
As his campaign has proven time and again, underestimating the New York businessman has been a path to defeat. Trump’s voters, Toretti said, may not condone everything their candidate does or says, but he’s tapping into an undeniable anger with the status quo.
“They may not be proud of it but they’re also intensely frustrated that they’re not respected and heard,” she added. “It’s at a point where they want to have a say, and some control.”
Wall Street Journal Editor: If Trump Is Caught in Scandal, Public Would Believe Us
President Trump is capable of committing great crimes, Gerard Baker said from his vantage point as editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal.
“This administration is absolutely capable of really grave malfeasance,” Baker, whose newspaper is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWSA – Get Report) , said on Thursday, Oct. 12, at a New York event hosted by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.
Commenting on Trump’s threats this week to revoke broadcast licenses tied to Comcast Corp.’s (CMCSA – Get Report) NBC News, Baker said the statements have far-reaching implications, regardless of whether the president plans to carry through on his threat. Earlier this week, NBC News reported that in July Trump had called for a tenfold increase in nuclear arms, a proposal that apparently caught military officials by surprise. Trump attacked the report as “pure fiction made up to demean” him, suggesting that the network be shut down.
“What he said about revoking broadcast licenses is pernicious, it’s obnoxious,” Baker said. “He may not have the legal power to do that, and it might seem like a futile exercise, but it’s damaging to trust, damaging to the institutions of democracy.”
Yet if news were to emerge in the coming months that shows, for instance, that the Trump campaign knowingly colluded with the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton, Baker said much of the public would never believe it. Trump, he said, has effectively demonized nearly all news outlets as being personally out to get him and, by extension, his supporters. Throughout the campaign, Baker said, Trump often bashed the so-called mainstream media, portraying reporters as being faithful to a system that’s not working for ordinary people.
“The danger is that the perception of the press is so hostile,” he said. “If something emerges of really serious malfeasance, and the press reports on that, many, many people in this country are not going to believe it, they’re just going to put it down as media bias. That is an astonishing fact, and if that is true, it is astonishingly damaging to the country.”
As for his own coverage of the Trump administration, Baker acknowledged that some news observers, and some within his own newsroom, have charged that the Journal has pulled back its reporters, ceding ground to The Washington Post and The New York Times. Critics alleged the conservative politics of News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and the entrenched positions of its editorial page are influencing newsroom decisions about which stories to pursue.
Baker deflected the criticism, countering the Journal “has done very robust reporting” about Trump, though he did add, “It’s true, we have not done the reporting on the scale of some others.” Yet it’s the Journal’s comparative discretion, Baker argued, that ultimately may afford the newspaper the weight and cachet to convince otherwise skeptical Trump supporters that evidence sufficient to impeach a president might actually be true.
“If we do even better reporting, that can actually demonstrate some terrible things that did happen,” Baker said. “People are more likely to believe us than they are anyone else.”
In July, the Journal wrote that U.S. intelligence agencies caught Russian officials talking about Trump associates in spring 2015, just before the real estate developer’s announcement that he would pursue the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. The newspaper also reported that Republican operatives sought out Russian hackers to obtain emails sent by Hillary Clinton well before she became the Democratic presidential nominee.
Alan Murray, chief content officer at Time Inc. (TIME) and a former editor of Fortune magazine, agreed with Baker, saying the media risked losing the public’s trust if it overshot on attacking Trump.
“The president has launched a systematic campaign to undercut the credibility of the institutions that could damage him at some point,” Murray said. “He has baited the press with this ‘fake news’ thing, and many of our colleagues have taken the bait and are destroying their own credibility in the process.”
Yet much of the media, Murray added, has discovered only too well that attacking Trump generates readers and, in turn, the kind of internet traffic that attracts advertisers.
The declining confidence in journalists arguably has been ongoing since the 1960s, though the causes for that decline are debatable. That question aside, Trump has been able to successfully lump critical reporting with personal attacks, solidifying the loyalty of his core supporters as the media, writ large, loses its credibility with those same voters.
“We have a democracy, and democracy depends on an informed public,” Murray said. “If we don’t have any ability to provide some basis of factual information to the whole country, we have a serious problem. That credibility was already damaged before Donald Trump, but he consciously and skillfully mined that and made it worse. It’s a bad thing for the country.”
Amazon’s ‘Manchester’ Success Is Forcing Hollywood to Change
The way people watch video has changed dramatically over the past 10 years as streaming services such as Amazon, Netflix and Hulu have made subscription video on demand and binge-watching as customary as Sunday viewing of the NFL.
Yet as TV viewing has been transformed by technology, the film industry has mostly stayed the same.
In winning two Oscars on Sunday for its Manchester by the Sea, Amazon followed Hollywood’s conventional rules for film distribution, opening the family drama starring Casey Affleck in theaters while keeping it away from streaming services, including its own.
But movie theater attendance was flat in 2016, and video-on-demand and DVD sales have fallen by 50% over the past 10 years. Further highlighting the disconnect between consumer demand for mobile video and a movie industry huddled in Los Angeles, the audience for Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony on Disney‘s ABC was the lowest in nine years for the industry’s marquee event, according to Nielsen.
To reverse worrisome trends, Hollywood is being forced to consider making some films available at home near or when they open in theaters, a practice known in the industry as a day-and-date release.
Amazon’s impressive wins on Sunday for best actor and best original screenplay could accelerate a demand for streaming first-run films, said Jason Krikorian, a co-founder of Sling Media and a general partner at early-stage venture capita firm DCM Ventures.
“As companies like Amazon and others remain quite focused on delivering top-notch content to devices in your home, then consumers will also get used to consuming top-notch two-hour-type content, movies, just as they have very good television,” Krikorian said from Menlo Park, Calif. “Once more new films are available in a home setting, that will create a consumer expectation, a level of enjoyment that will further add to that momentum.”
In recent months, the heads of Hollywood’s major studios have been meeting with theater owners to talk about making some films available for streaming near or on the same day they open at the local cinema. Thus far, nothing definitive has emerged from these conversations, though conversations are ongoing, said Stacey Snider, chairman and CEO of 21st Century Fox unit 20th Century Fox Film, earlier this month at Recode’s Code Media conference.
“Most films, even the blockbusters, have done 90% to 95% of their business within three or four weeks [of opening],” Snider said. “So who is this helping to not offer much earlier, and who is it hurting?”
Snider herself was circumspect, proclaiming that there are pluses and minuses to narrowing or shutting the window between the day that a film debuts in a theater to the day when it is available for streaming.
“Sooner seems to make sense,” she said. “But if whatever corner of the market that we have is creating a huge, global, big and beautiful cinematic experience, then the last thing we want to do is commoditize it, make it so that it’s interchangeable with the home entertainment center.”
The solution, Snider added, isn’t to be found in “smashing the window but in tightening it.”
So far, theater owners have resisted such moves, declaring that so-called day-and-date releases are ultimately bad for the studios. Theater owners often site the disappointing numbers for the films Margin Call (2011) and Arbitrage (2012), both released by Roadside Attractions, the independent distribution company that’s 43% owned by Lions Gate Entertainment.
“They got out of that business because it doesn’t work,” said Patrick Corcoran, a Los Angeles-based spokesman for the National Association of Theatre Owners. “Customers have a sense that it’s maybe not worth the same thing because it’s simultaneously available in the home.”
Offering first-run films in the home, Corcoran said, is a race to the bottom. The proliferation of high-quality television serials has produced a glut in the home market. Adding new films to the mix would undercut pricing for the studios and the theaters.
Nonetheless, Corcoran acknowledged that studios are eager to offset declines in VOD and DVD sales and that the industry is willing to work with them to accomplish that goal.
A compromise may be in order.
One popular option is that some films would be available for a given period of time at a higher price, $50 for example, and that theater owners would share in a portion of the digital revenue. While the studios and theater owners aren’t likely to make their blockbuster films immediately available online, it’s possible smaller-budget films such as Fences, the drama starring Denzel Washington and Oscar-winner Viola Davis and produced by Viacom‘s Paramount Pictures, might be. Finding a price point to entice customers and keep studios and theater owners happy, though, will be tricky.
Still, as Amazon seeks to be a bigger player in Hollywood, at least for small-to-medium-budget films that play well with adult audiences, it’s increasingly likely that the world’s largest retailer with a burgeoning Prime membership business will push for a shorter release window.
And when it does, it’s possible that more people will want to stay up late to watch the Academy Awards. Especially if Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway make a return.
Squatters’ Movement Surges in Barcelona
Juan Carlos Padilla lives in an apartment building with crumbling walls, exposed electrical wiring and peeling linoleum floors.
It’s far from luxurious. But the rent the 27-year-old sometime construction worker pays makes it all worthwhile: nothing.
Padilla is among an estimated 1,500 young Spaniards who have taken over empty buildings as homes, triggering major clashes with police seeking to evict them.
The “Okupa” (Squatters) movement is fueled by 40% unemployment among 18- to 26-year-olds–almost double Spain’s overall jobless rate–and by high rents.
Last fall, Padilla and some friends broke into a building that had been empty for 27 years, since it was condemned for electrical and building code violations. They made it their home. “This is space for housing,” said Padilla, gesturing at a room he and his fellow squatters have cleaned, painted and furnished with an old wooden table and beanbag chairs. “If the owner lets a place go to waste, we have the right to take it over.”
Barcelona is the heart of the Okupa movement. About 70 apartment buildings and factories have been taken over by about 500 squatters, most under age 30.
A few of the larger buildings are used for political organizing, art exhibitions and theater performances. Others are like bars, serving beer and playing music. Many squatters consider themselves anarchists, drawing inspiration from Barcelona’s far-left labor unions of the Spanish Civil War.
While seeking ways to deal with the issue of idle buildings, the Catalan regional government says it must evict squatters to ensure respect for private property rights.
And neighbors complain of late-night noise, petty theft and hijacked telephone and electricity services around squatter buildings, says Joan Serra, the head of the Catalan youth affairs department.
The Okupa movement gained notoriety in October when 200 helmeted police officers fought a five-hour pitched battle to evict 400 squatters from a movie theater in downtown Barcelona.
Officers, supported by a helicopter and riot-control vehicles, fired rubber bullets and tear gas. The “Okupas” hurled rocks and bottles.
When it was over, 48 squatters were under arrest for illegal occupation of private property. Ten were hospitalized.
The Okupas had chosen the Cine Princesa theater, empty for 15 years, to protest a May 1996 law that made squatting a criminal offense. It was in-your-face activism. The theater is a few blocks from City Hall and a police station in Barcelona’s historic Gothic Barrio.
Since the street battle, police have staged predawn eviction raids elsewhere in the city. The Okupas have responded with tit-for-tat “invasions” of other empty buildings.
In March, police in Madrid evicted squatters from a building, resulting in 158 arrests, injuries to four Okupas and a policeman, and a subsequent protest by 1,000 Okupas and their supporters that snarled traffic on the Paseo de la Castellana for hours.
Eager to calm tensions in Barcelona, the Catalan government is consulting with experts in cities like Berlin and Paris to learn how they dealt with squatter movements there that had a heyday in the 1970s.
The answer: Tough enforcement combined with more affordable housing, said Serra, the youth affairs official.
In Berlin, a 1981 law gave police the right to make immediate evictions. Today, just eight buildings are occupied by squatters, compared with dozens nearly two decades ago, authorities say.
How to provide enough housing is another matter. As long as Spanish property owners pay taxes on empty buildings, there is no law allowing the government to seize the property as abandoned.
Jaume Asens, a lawyer representing squatters in Barcelona, recommends that the city copy an ordinance used by officials in Amsterdam, Netherlands, to fine owners who leave an apartment empty for more than a year.
Officials say they also are studying a proposal to increase taxes on buildings and apartments that are unused for more than a year.
Barcelona has 70,000 vacant apartments, some abandoned, others with rents far beyond the means of young Spaniards.
So far, no formal proposals have been made to create more affordable housing.
Padilla says that until the government creates more jobs and brings down housing costs, squatting will continue.
“What is a young person supposed to do?” he asked. “Live at home his whole life?”
Cuban Video Game Creator Seeks to Be First in Post-Fidel World
Josuhe Pagliery was in Miami the night of Fidel’s death.
A moment that had perplexed and fascinated Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits for decades had finally come to pass. A Cuban visual artist, Pagliery, 35, had been in the U.S. since early November to raise money and gather some publicity in hopes that he and a computer programmer friend might become the first from their island nation to create a fully animated video game.
“It was very shocking, super strange to be here in the U.S. when that happened,” Pagliery said from the home of family he’d never met until this visit, his first to the U.S. “This is someone you’ve known your entire life, and then to see it from another perspective — it’s a very strange feeling.”
In a few days, Pagliery is due to get to get back on a plane and return to Cuba, his family, his girlfriend and a life he says is going to change in untold ways.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty right now both with your new president Trump and now that Fidel is gone,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen, but change will come, and all I can hope is that it will be change for the better.”
Pagliery was in New York and Miami with the help of the Innovadores Foundation, the first program of its kind to bring young Cuban engineers and tech-focused developers to the U.S. to learn the nuts and bolts of creating a startup company that might have practical benefits for a country with many needs.
This past summer, a second group of young Cubans, three in total, spent six weeks in Manhattan at Grand Central Tech, a so-called incubator project funded in part by Alphabet‘s Google, PepsiCo and JPMorgan Chase .
Pagliery’s work as a multimedia artist had come to the attention of Jonathan Matusky, a Carnegie Mellon University engineering graduate and full-time Innovadores staff member who lives in Havana, spending much of his time meeting with students and others working in technology fields in addition to shuttling between the recently created U.S. Embassy and Cuban officials on behalf of the program.
Pagliery, who wants to become the first Cuban to create a video game, worked with Matusky to establish an Indiegogo crowd-sourcing site that recently surpassed its goal of raising $10,000 to develop a video game, Savior. Crowd sourcing may be common in the U.S., but to Pagliery it was little short of magical. “We’re very happy with how everything has come together,” he said.
In Savior, characters discover that they’re actually living inside a video game and that the game itself is falling apart. Players then try to save the world from total collapse, weaving their way through a maze of traps and creatures.
Together with his partner, Johann Hernández Armenteros, Pagliery created Empty Head Games, a bold development in itself given the Cuban government’s many restrictions on private enterprise and the near-total absence of independent funding.
“The game is really a reflection of a life as a Cuban living in a cyberworld that may seem as though it’s years behind but revels in what it does know,” he said. “For me and video games, I don’t have the widest access to information, so I bring back my memories of a gamer from maybe 20 years ago and include that in my own game. Ultimately, it was a very personal experience that went into making the game.”
Pagliery’s trip to the U.S. comes as lovers of Cuban music, dance, history and sport have been visiting the island in recent months, taking advantage of the willingness of the U.S. and the Castro government to renew diplomatic relations. Some trips are about rural development while others provide polished tours of the arts. Considering how arduous it used to be to travel to a city 105 miles from Key West — and how travel still must fit into one of 12 categories — round-trip flights to Havana originating from Miami occur at remarkably regular intervals.
These days, Americans are as common a sight in Cuba as Europeans and Russians. Either way, the opening is real despite the limitations of a 58-year-old economic embargo. Just how that relationship will evolve under president-elect Donald Trump and Cuban President Raul Castro, freed from the constraints of his brother, are fuzzy.
The same might be said about the Innovadores Foundation, itself a product of patience and commitment on the part of Miles Spencer, a tech startup investor, and John Caulfield, the recently retired chief of the U.S. Interests Section office in Havana from 2011 to 2014. Spencer heard Caulfield speak a few years ago and approached him with an idea of connecting young tech-minded Cubans with similarly ambitious young people in New York.
By living and working in Havana, Caulfield built up the kind of relations essential to alleviating the fears of Cuban government officials that some of its country’s finest minds would use the Innovadores program to defect. Working quietly, Spencer related this summer how they were able to get the Obama administration on board before making a successful presentation to the Cubans.
In preparing for their third class at Grand Central Tech in the summer of 2017, Innovadores provides informal assistance and advice to app developers, designers and other entrepreneurs. the goal, Caulfield said in an email, is to match Cubans with technical experts and potential financial backers in the U.S.
Pagliery himself arrived in New York in early November and promptly spent much of his first 24 hours in an apartment in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill sending and receiving emails in support of his crowd-sourcing campaign. Most of his initial support has come from other video game enthusiasts curious about the work of a Cuban developer.
Being in New York put Pagliery in a thrilling daze. The crowds, the speed of things, the very tall buildings and, of course, the internet were “super cool,” he said.
“If you want to open a full page with graphics in Cuba, you could wait a half hour,” he said. “If you go to a Wi-Fi hotspot, you have more of a real internet, but you have to go to sit on a curb in the street with a lot of people around you, a lot of noise, not a real way to do work. And there’s an expense, you have to pay for it, and it’s not cheap.”
Eager and amiable in the way of a first-time visitor, Pagliery fluctuates between carefully choosing his words and letting his emotions run free, unencumbered by the thorny terrain of geopolitics. Going back to Havana means confronting a slower internet but also reconnecting with Hernández, whose opportunities to travel outside of Cuba are limited because he’s a programmer; as an artist, Pagliery says, he has more chances to travel and for that reason also has visited Madrid and London, though securing such visas can take months or even years.
For Pagilery, the next three to four months promise to be very busy, highlighted, hopefully, he says, by a demo of Savior in March at a Havana art gallery. If all goes as planned, he hopes to relaunch the Indiegogo campaign with an eye to getting a distribution deal for the video game in the U.S. or Japan.
What happens after that, he says, is unclear.
“People in Cuba, sadly, have learned to wait,” he said. “Time in Cuba works in a different way than probably any other place in the world. But honestly and frankly, I think things will go faster in ways that older people didn’t have, to choose to move wherever you want, not to be restrained.”
“In the U.S., I see many opportunities that I don’t have in Cuba, but maybe in Cuba I have more time to work. I like to try to see the best of the two countries, and then keep going and going.”
Zell Takes Over Tribune, Closing $8.2 Billion Buyout
Billionaire investor Sam Zell completed the $8.2 billion buyout of Tribune Co., ending the newspaper publisher’s 24 years as a publicly traded company.
Zell becomes chief executive officer and chairman, taking on about $12 billion in debt as advertising revenue from the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune declines. The purchase follows an industrywide plunge in stock prices as well as Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of Dow Jones & Co. this month and McClatchy Co.’s takeover of Knight Ridder Inc. last year.\
AFL-CIO, Wary of Koch Money, Presses Tribune Not to Sell its Newspapers
Brandon Rees, who helps oversee the AFL-CIO’s pension fund investments, is trying to convince Tribune to shelve any sale of its eight daily newspapers, which include The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune.
Rees’ lobbying was prompted by David and Charles Koch, the Tea Party-funding multi-billionaire owners of the oil and chemicals conglomerate Koch Industries, who have said they may bid for the newspapers if Tribune decides to put them up for sale. Tribune, which could owe as much as $225 million in back taxes, needs the cash.
Rees, the acting director of the AFL’s Office of Investment, is realistic about the situation. If Tribune wants to sell and the Koch brothers want to buy, there are few humans on the planet capable of outbidding them. Each of the Koch brothers has a personal fortune totaling $43 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, while Koch Industries generates $115 billion in annual sales. The brothers are the sixth and seventh wealthiest people in the world.
The Kochs have also been among the country’s largest funders of groups that seek to undercut public pension fund benefits and curtail collective bargaining by municipal unions. Labor unions, as well as groups urging steps to combat global warming, another Koch foe, are loath to see these dailies become a unit of one of the world’s largest fossil fuel providers.
Regardless of the overall decline in circulation, the papers remain major institutions in their home regions. They include the largest dailies in Illinois, California, Maryland ( The Baltimore Sun) and Connecticut ( Hartford Courant) as well as two in the politically-charged state of Florida ( Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale), and also the national Spanish-language daily Hoy.
Ironically, the sale could be an immediate gain for some of the union federation’s members. That’s because billions of dollars in members’ pension fund monies are managed by L.A.-based Oaktree Capital Management, the world’s largest distressed debt investor, which owns a 23% stake in Tribune, making it the media company’s largest shareholder.
Rees argues that selling now, even at a profit, would shortchange union members. Tribune’s newspapers, which exited a messy and debilitating four-year bankruptcy in December, are beginning to show improvement as Oaktree President Bruce Karsh, who doubles as Tribune’s chairman, said in a letter last month to national and California labor leaders. Tribune’s “publishing assets are performing ahead of plan thus far this year” said Karsh, adding that a sale is only one option the company is considering.
Silicon Valley Is Laying Low on Net Neutrality
To sustain net neutrality rules designed to check the power of the country’s largest internet providers, Craig Aaron of Free Press will need all the help he can get.
But the president and CEO of the Washington public interest policy group isn’t expecting an outpouring of activism from Silicon Valley.
“It wouldn’t hurt,” Aaron said. “Anybody who can bring political clout and political power to these debates is welcome, but Silicon Valley has always been followers on this side of the fight rather than taking the lead and saying these are our policy priorities.”
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai on Tuesday, Nov. 21, announced plans to undo rules passed by the agency less than three years ago aimed at ensuring that all internet traffic be treated equally. Known as net neutrality, the regulations limit the ability of an internet provider to block or slow traffic and, most importantly, prevent favoring its own content through so-called fast lanes.
Free Press and other consumer advocacy groups led crowds of boisterous internet advocates in a series of colorful protests held in front of the FCC, urging Tom Wheeler, an Obama appointee, to pass the regulations formally known as the Open Internet Order in February 2015. The Democrat-led commission passed the order in a 3-2 party line vote.
As it did in the run-up to that vote, AT&T Inc. (T – Get Report) last week used Pai’s proposal to denounce Wheeler for an “ill-conceived experiment with heavy-handed regulation of the internet.” AT&T along with Comcast Corp. (CMCSA – Get Report) and Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ – Get Report) , Pai’s former employer, have been clamoring for net neutrality’s repeal ever since Donald Trump’s election handed Republicans majority control of the five-member FCC.
But if telecom’s firepower on Capitol Hill is to be met with equal force, it’s unclear whether top executives at Facebook Inc. (FB – Get Report) , Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL – Get Report) , Netflix Inc. (NFLX – Get Report) , Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN – Get Report) and Apple Inc. (AAPL – Get Report) will lead that charge.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings admitted as much in May in an interview with Recode when he said that net neutrality is “not our primary battle at this point,” adding that the Trump administration will find a way “to unwind the rules no matter what anybody says.”
Not exactly fighting words.
In July, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg encouraged his many users to get involved on the issue, stating in a post that net neutrality was essential to guarantee that service providers can’t “block you from seeing certain content or can make you pay extra for it.”
Zuckerberg said Facebook plans to work with members of congress to support the rules. He also added a link to the Internet Association, Silicon’s Valley’s Washington lobbying group, which has done most of the heavy-lifting in D.C. on behalf of the country’s tech companies. Amazon also linked its call to action to the association’s website.
Indeed, the Internet Association has met with Pai and made a series of filings arguing, as it did last Tuesday, that Pai’s “proposal undoes nearly two decades of bipartisan agreement on baseline net neutrality principles that protect Americans’ ability to access the entire internet.”
The association declined further comment.
Some of the association’s smaller members — Etsy Inc. (ETSY – Get Report) , Pinterest Inc., Kickstarter PBC, Dropbox Inc. — have taken a higher profile to argue that as internet providers such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon own more content — AT&T may still buy Time Warner Inc. (TWX) while Comcast already owns NBCUniversal — it’s only natural that they’ll play favorites.
Aaron, meanwhile, doesn’t downplay the importance of Facebook, Amazon or Google publicizing the fight to safeguard net neutrality rules. By comparison, the telecom lobby, he says, has flooded Capitol Hill, aggressively pushing its agenda.
Already this year, the FCC under Pai, a former associate counsel at Verizon, has hammered through a series of rule changes that will allow TV station operators such as Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. (SBGI – Get Report) to own more stations as well as newspapers or radio outlets in a single market. Still more could be on the way.
Silicon Valley is laying low, playing the proverbial both sides-of-the-aisle as they lick wounds sustained by criticism that it hasn’t done enough to protect users’ privacy while guarding against the sort of hacking perpetuated by Russian operatives leading up to the 2016 elections. When Google, Twitter Inc. (TWTR – Get Report) and Facebook executives were asked to appear before Congress last month to talk about those issues, they didn’t send their CEOs.
It may just be that when it comes to net neutrality, Silicon Valley’s largest companies may not need the protections as much as smaller technology players. The same goes for start-up companies angling to become the next Facebook or Netflix — provided their services aren’t blocked or throttled.
“When it comes to advocating, most of these companies support the right policy and their trade associations put out the right kinds of letters,” Aaron said. “But are they going all out for this? Not all of them, and that’s partly because they are big companies now, and they have a lot of different interests.”
Rockaway’s Wave Seeks to Rebuild a Neighborhood, and a Newspaper
Six weeks after Hurricane Sandy tore through the Rockaways, pouring five feet of seawater into Kevin Boyle’s home, the part-time adjunct professor and one-time bar owner found himself rebuilding not just his house of 20 years but the peninsula’s 120-year-old weekly newspaper and the community that depends on it.
On Oct. 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy, with winds topping 95 miles per hour and waves reaching 40 feet, roared through The Wave‘s offices on the first floor of a modest brick building on Rockaway Beach Boulevard about 400 feet from the Atlantic Ocean. Rooms were left thick with mud and sand. Desks and computers were hurtled to the floor and a sink torn from a wall.
In the months that followed, Boyle and publisher Susan Locke sought to revive The Wave, rounding up new computers, rebuilding its circulation base and creating a makeshift newsroom on a flood-proof floor above the old one. Since becoming editor in December, Boyle has been equal parts cheerleader, gadfly and scold for the sometimes-stumbling efforts of government agencies and business leaders to rebuild the Rockaways after the worst storm to ever hit New York’s shoreline.
“We’re an advocate, and I don’t apologize for being an advocate,” Boyle said in an interview in early October at the newspaper’s cramped temporary office. “I don’t like kicking a dog when it’s down and the Rockaways right now are a dog, so I’m not about to kick it.”
Before Sandy, The Wave was much like any typical community newspaper, reporting on local development, Church socials and high school sports. But when the hurricane hit, nearly everything on the narrow 11-mile peninsula changed, including its weekly paper.
Boyle edited The Wave for five years ending in 2000, departing when he said his writing “started to get stale.” This time around has been different. The Wave post-Sandy has sought to help shape the Rockaways’ recovery by reporting on sand replenishment and boardwalk rebuilding, the potential ramifications of rising flood insurance premiums and how government agencies are spending the millions of dollars earmarked for the area.
“The difference between then and now is night and day,” says Boyle, his salt-and-pepper hair offset by the bright shorts and long sleeve t-shirt of a middle-aged beachcomber. “Back then, big news was a car crash. Now, it’s life and death, if not death than certainly life changing stuff for so many people. It’s exciting and it’s confusing.”
In those first few days after Sandy, homeowners and tenants struggled to get basic supplies, food and water. Much of the Rockaways’ 5.5-mile long Depression-era boardwalk, the heart and soul of the community, had been ripped from its pylons. Mounds of sand seven feet high blocked driveways while entire houses were tugged from their foundations and wooden homes reduced to piles of sticks. Cars lay at crazy angles, many overturned. The Rockaways was in shambles, made worse by a lack of reliable information.
The Wave didn’t publish for four weeks following the hurricane, the only time in its 120-year history the newspaper had been unable to produce a copy. Flooding on the boulevard kept Locke from entering its offices for three days, and when she did, Locke discovered that files containing the newspaper’s subscription and accounts receivable had also been destroyed. Books of bound original newspapers dating back to its inception were damaged beyond repair. (Copies are kept on microfilm at Queens Public Library.)
“We had to start from scratch,” said Locke, 66, who took over publishing chores in 2001 after the death of her husband Leon Locke, its colorful owner and publisher since 1975. “Everything was destroyed. There was just so much sand and mud. It was a mess. I couldn’t even find my old desk.”
The absence of The Wave – its Web site was also knocked offline — exacerbated the panic, and for some, the desperation that went with losing a home, or worse. Rumors about crime and looting, which largely proved false, Boyle said, went unchecked. Homeowners were given conflicting instructions about whether to keep evidence of damage, or get rid of it.
When Boyle, 54, came by The Wave in early December to see how his former employer was faring, an anxious Locke hurriedly asked if he’d return. Given to bouts of impulsivity, Boyle accepted.
“There was a huge information vacuum in the short and long weeks after Sandy,” recalled Boyle. “The Wave wasn’t able to do its job, which tells you how devastated this place was. I just came by because I hadn’t heard anything, and Susan Locke said ‘can you come back?’ I have itchy feet, I’m always looking for a change, and Rockaway is in store for about the most exciting time in its history, so I said ‘O.K.'”
At Boyle’s wall-side cubicle sits a line of 100-plus page reports from city, state and federal agencies including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. A college English major, Boyle takes grudging pride in monitoring these proposal and recommendations that are likely to reshape the peninsula, physically and otherwise, for generations.
The Wave is published every Friday and distributed to about 100 stores on the Rockaways and a few more just off the peninsula. Along with Boyle, assistant editor and reporter Dan Guarino carry much of the paper’s editorial responsibilities augmented by a part-time reporter, Katie McFadden and a stringer, Miriam Rosenberg. Locke handles the publishing chores along with managing partner Sandy Bernstein and about 20 to 25 part-employees selling advertising, subscriptions and monitoring the newspaper’s distribution.
The Wave‘s Web site is a bare bones production though Boyle says he’s not under the same pressure as larger newspapers to create something slick to better capture page views. Most local advertisers, he said, aren’t comfortable with the notion of buying an online banner ad. They want to feel the advertisement.
“We’re mostly geared toward getting the print out,” Boyle said. “Conventional wisdom says newspapers are dying, and no time sooner than for the Rockaways. Can we do more to get younger, sure, but we’re still the institution out here. We do what The Post, The News and even The Times can’t do, which is cover neighborhoods like ours to the extent we can.”
Boyle grew up in Marine Park, Brooklyn, and recalls hanging out as a teenager in Jacob Riis Park, which lies on the western side of Rockaway next to Breezy Point. In the 2000s, when he owned a bar in Bay Ridge, The Brooklyn Dodger, now closed, Boyle was living with his wife and son in Sunset Park. The move to the Rockaways, he says, was prompted for parking, Bay Ridge and Sunset Park being particularly challenging for car owners without driveways. Boyle bought a home in Rockaway Park, one of many micro-neighborhood squeezed onto the peninsula.
“You kind of get stuck here once you move here,” he said. “People are usually here to stay. It’s part of the reason there are generations here. Firemen and cops, they love the job so they pass it on.”
The Rockaways are unlike most any city neighborhood, anywhere. Its many distinct neighborhoods face the Atlantic, absorbing its cool summer breezes and harsh winter winds. It’s a mostly working-class place, not much different than large tracks of Brooklyn or Queens, except for the presence of its long beach, a summer attraction for New Yorkers since the 1830s.
Rockaway Beach made the peninsula famous though for a younger generation, The Ramones song of the same name delivered a different sort of notoriety. The Rockaways extend westward from a boot of southern Queens and Suffolk County running perpendicular to south Brooklyn across Jamaica Bay from John F. Kennedy Airport. The peninsula is actually part of Queens, and with a population of 120,000 it’s larger than Albany, the state capitol.
On its western end, the Rockaways are overwhelmingly populated by white, upper-and-middle income neighborhoods of Irish and Italians, orthodox Jews and secular Jews. The neighborhood of Neponsit, bordered by Jacob Riis Park on its west and Belle Harbor on its east, posts a median household income greater than $103,000, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. Parking restrictions around the stately, suburban-sized houses make Neponsit’s beaches, which don’t have a boardwalk, difficult to access for non-residents.
Further west of Jacob Riis and Fort Tilden, lies the mostly working-class gated-community of Breezy Point, a place where residents pay directly for maintenance, security and other services in effort to keep city agencies at bay. The Rockaway’s western enclaves include large numbers of police and fire employees. In a moment of bitter irony, 125 Breezy Point homes were burned to ashes by fires that broke out after many of its residents were summoned to work overtime to deal with Hurricane Sandy.
Far Rockaway on the peninsula’s eastern side is a much different place. The communities of Arverne East and Edgemere cover census tracks with a median household income as low as $23,000. Weather-beaten high-rise apartments stand next to dilapidated, empty lots and boarded-up storefronts. Drugs remain a problem. The area has long been a dumping ground for unlucky public housing residents and poorly-financed government health facilities.
The rows of public housing towers were products of the “urban renewal” projects of the 1950s and 1960s when the untamable city planner Robert Moses bulldozed older bungalows neglected as homeowners moved to Long Island’s beckoning suburbs. The high-rises ended up destroying rather than nurturing the growth of vibrant neighborhoods, exacerbating the Far Rockaway’s physical isolation from the rest of the city.
Today, violent crime in the eastern 101st Precinct is twice as high as that of the 100th in the western half of the peninsula, according to data compiled by the New York City Police Department. This year through Oct. 6, the 101st counted two murders, 12 rapes, 105 robberies and 167 felony assaults. By comparison, the 100th precinct recorded one murder, three rapes, 44 robberies and 114 felony assaults. Life in Far Rockaway was already challenged before Sandy.
Boyle is mindful of the contrasting Rockaways but says he tends to focus on stories that cut across class and racial lines, such as rebuilding the boardwalk and securing the necessary funds to help homeowners and businesses recover from the storm. The Wave has higher subscriber numbers from its western neighborhoods, which is one reason Boyle admits to emphasizing issues that may resonate stronger with homeowners in the Rockaways western neighborhoods.
“If the crime is part of a trend, if it affects a lot of people, we’ll write about it,” Boyle said. “If it’s an important story that involves a lot of people and there’s a crime, I’m always going to emphasize the story that impacts more people. If anything during a couple of periods in The Wave they probably emphasized crime too much.”
Milan Taylor, who grew up the eastern Rockaway neighborhood of Arverne appreciates that Boyle doesn’t play up crime in the Far Rockaways. Three years ago, Taylor created the Rockaway Youth Task Force after transferring from Central Connecticut State University to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. He’d held positions in student government and realized upon his return that the Far Rockaways lacked a community group run by young people.
The Wave has increased its coverage of the Far Rockaways, Taylor says, though he’s quick to add that there’s a sense from his neighborhood that the triumphs, the good news, isn’t recognized enough.
“It’s not so much under-coverage,” Taylor said. “The Wave‘s readership is predominantly from the western end, so he’s going to cater to that audience. But then the opposite argument could be made that maybe the readership is more in the western end because their stories or issues get highlighted more. It’s definitely a Catch-22.”
Before Sandy, the Rockaways were enjoying a renaissance. Young people from the north Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick were discovering its wide and accessible beaches. Rockaway Taco had emerged as a mecca, joined by other eateries such as Rippers, featuring its grass-fed beef burgers.
Even real estate was selling well. Patti Smith, the darling of American rock, had purchased a house in the Rockaways as had Andrew Van Wyngarden from the indie band MGMT. Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA’s PS1 in Long Island City was another newfound Rockaway resident. (Over the summer, PS1 erected a geoedesic dome near the ocean at Beach 94th Street which held exhibitions, film screenings and performances addressing the Rockaways in the wake of Sandy.)
A hearty community of year-round surfers had also emerged to share beachside rentals to store their gear and gather at the Rockaway Surf Club for music and drink. Rockaway had become cool again.
Many longtime Rockaway residents, Boyle says, were nonetheless skeptical of the Hipster influx. Young people with brightly-colored shoes have long alienated old schoolers, and this was no different.
“There was some ambivalence about the Hipsters when they first started showing up in large numbers though I was always in favor of an influx of energy and youth,” Boyle said. “But the Hipsters, which is a gross generalization, more than did themselves proud and worthy when they helped after Sandy.
“They came here by bike, worked like dogs and left by bike in the dark. I saw it every day – the same people who came for Rockaway Taco and the concessions and looked cooler than that, worked like dogs for Rockaway. I can’t forget that and I think more and more people appreciate that, too.”
Conversely, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s initial decision, backed by former Mayor Ed Koch, to hold the New York City Marathon on the Sunday following the hurricane even as thousands of New Yorkers had yet to return to their homes and the Rockaways’ streets were still thick with wreckage, was regarded as proof that the outer reaches of the outer boroughs aren’t even an afterthought.
“We were outraged and ready to lay down in the streets of Brooklyn to stop the Marathon,” Boyle recalls. “Civil disobedience would have occurred, I can assure you. That was maybe the grossest example of ‘you don’t think we’re ignored by the rest of the city.'”
Boyle often writes two or three stories a week but it’s his editorials that make the newspaper a must-read. Gritty and acerbic, he often chides government agencies and politicians for not doing what they said they’d do, or taking too long to do it. The New York City Parks Department has taken the brunt of Boyle’s jabs though FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers have also been targets.
In March, Boyle published the first front-page editorial in the history of The Wave. The topic was the federal Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act that Congress passed overwhelmingly in 2012 and was signed by President Obama just prior to Sandy. The Act, which raises flood insurance premiums to more closely match rates charged in the private market, was designed to refund a program depleted by Hurricane Katrina.
Intended or not, Biggert-Waters could raise flood premiums to as much as $30,000 per year for some homeowners living in high-risk areas by eliminating subsidies that helped and even encouraged private developers to build on low-lying land. Boyle argues that the premiums may force thousands of homeowners to sell their homes, wiping out the Rockaways and an unusual way of life that merges living on the ocean with living in the country’s largest city. FEMA estimates that 20% of its 5.5 million policyholders receive subsidies.
“We realize there’s arguments to be made about living so close to the shore,” Boyle said. “But we’re talking about many coastal communities. And if you want to talk subsidies, let’s remember that the subways are subsidized as are the highways. Anyone who reflexively says we shouldn’t live out here should probably do some self-examination. Nobody is pure in this.”
The front-page March editorial yelled “Read This!” in large bold lettering.
“Some people were angry with that editorial because they said I was scaring people,” he said. “I debated doing it for a few weeks, but then decided this is really big, people have to know how serious this is. And FEMA saw it, and did come by to talk to me.”
At The Wave, Susan Locke is making plans to move the newspaper back downstairs to its storefront office on Rockaway Beach Boulevard to be closer to readers and potential advertisers. The former office space has been cleaned up though the flood’s watermark remains. A martial arts gymnasium currently occupies the space.
The newspaper’s circulation, currently at about 8,000, has yet to recover from a pre-Hurricane level over 10,000. Subscriptions are growing as more people return to live in homes that may have lost a roof, or businesses forced to shut down because of flood damage, but it’s a slow rebuild.
Advertising at The Wave has been picking up somewhat as construction companies come back to the Rockaways and more government aid and insurance money is released. A recent issue of the newspaper hit 92 pages, which wasn’t a record but was the largest since Sandy.
As a publication that gets most of its revenue from its print product, Boyle know that The Wave‘s future is tenuous in the age of the mobile device. But when he finds a moment to stop worrying about flood insurance premiums and delays in boardwalk reconstruction, Boyle says he envisions a Rockaway that emerges from Sandy better than before, and a newspaper with a popular even hip Web site — and a few more full-time reporters.
“It’s an interesting time but it’s also an overwhelming time,” Boyle said. “I thought this was a step-back in my life. I told them I’d revisit this in six months, and here I am at 10 months. So maybe I need to revisit it.”