Brooklyn’s Hipster Bike Race ‘It’s Not About the Money’

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Call it a grudge match for losing a bike race to a girl.

Or maybe a prototypical Brooklyn happening featuring a horde of cyclists riding fixed-gear track bikes with no brakes at night around a tight course on a long pier facing lower Manhattan in front of 8,000 people, drinking and shouting and trying to figure out who’s winning.

Either way, the Red Hook Crit has evolved in seven years into something of a mecca among cycling enthusiasts with survivalist inclinations. And as the Crit, short for criterium, has grown, the borough that it calls home has been remade once again by its younger inhabitants, many of them eager migrants who’ve gravitated to the self-confident hipster capital of the world in hopes of being among the best of their generation’s artists, developers, thinkers and promoters.

On Saturday, bikes and art will merge in a post-industrial landscape amid gourmet food trucks, craft beers and cool gear. The Red Hook Crit has become a millennial’s paradise, an event Baby Boomers could only dream about.

“Brooklyn’s where the action is, it’s where the opportunities are,” David Trimble, the race’s founder, said one afternoon earlier this month at the Crit’s storefront headquarters on Van Dyke Street in Red Hook, a block from New York harbor. “You can give a painter the chance to design a bike race poster, and that painter is there, ready and willing to do it. The pull of the creative community has been huge. You couldn’t do this anywhere else.”

A criterium is a bike race held on a short track of less than a mile, often in an urban or unusual location. The Red Hook Crit takes place in the enormous parking lot of the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, the docking station of the Queen Elizabeth and other ocean-going passenger vessels. The race runs 33 kilometers in laps of 3/4 of a mile. Time trials are held earlier in the day as some 200 cyclists from 17 countries seek to qualify for 85 positions.

An Apple  iPhone app keeps track of riders’ times, separated by hundredths of a second. Once the race begins, any rider who is lapped is forced to exit the contest, paring down the field. Of the 70 cyclists to start the 2013 race, just five finished.

“It requires you to focus in this environment where a lot of things are rushing at you really fast,” Trimble says. “It’s not like a road race where the race is kind of boring until someone makes a really strong move and wins. Every lap has to be done perfectly.”

Slightly-built with uncombed hair and a bit of stubble, Trimble, 31, spent his childhood around racetracks — autos, go-karts and bicycles — and as a mechanic on Indy-style car teams. His father and his uncles helped develop some of the earliest carbon fiber frames, some of which were used for Olympic teams. His uncle Brent co-founded Kestrel, a high-end specialty manufacturer. 

Skipping college, Trimble moved to New York in 2006, living for a time in the Red Hook wood shop of his uncle Vance (His father is one eight boys.) To celebrate his 26th birthday, he invited some friends to compete in a midnight bike race around his adopted neighborhood on a “short, technical course” along paved and cobblestone streets, guided only by the moon and street lights. There were no barriers separating bikes from pedestrians or moving cars. Thirteen people showed up.

“I wanted to give them a chance at personal glory,” said Trimble who speaks with something of a twang born of years spent in Alaska, Arkansas and Texas. “I was racing road bikes in Central Park, typical sanctioned races, but I was also racing Alley Cats, bike-messenger inspired races around the city, riding brakeless track bikes. Those are always really fun. I knew how maneuverable, exciting it is to race a track bike.”

Trimble lost that first Red Hook Crit, a mortal bruise that he only pretends to have accepted. The winner was a young woman named Kacey Manderfield Lloyd, widely accepted as an extraordinary athlete and fearsome biker. Manderfield, 27, has raced in five Red Hook Crits, finishing in the top 10 in each, an especially impressive accomplishment considering that only a handful of women have ever participated in the race.

For this year’s competition, Trimble convinced Manderfield to direct the first ever women’s Red Hook Crit. That field is expected to reach 50 riders. 

“I had to overcome a whole lot of mental hurdles to wind up where I did,” Manderfield said in a phone interview from her home in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. “I had only raced a track bike on a velodrome because that was the only place I thought you were allowed to ride a track bike.”

By the end of the race’s third year, Trimble had a sense he was onto something big. He wasn’t alone. The New York City police told him he needed a permit if he wanted to keep holding his annual bike race/beer party. So, Trimble did what his generation seems to do with aplomb: he started a business based on a personal passion. Trimble formed Red Hook Crit LLC, joined the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and began to work with the New York Economic Development Corporation to secure funding and logistical support.

In 2010, he helped organize an art show, ‘The Unifying Machine,’ to further publicize the race and give it it’s own aesthetic. The Bicycle Film Festival also got involved, recording the event.

“Suddenly, we were bringing all these creative people to be involved in the race,” Trimble said. “Most race organizers might not think that a poster design is important, but that’s super important.” The Smithsonian Institute recently asked Trimble to donate all of the race’s graphic designs to the museum.

Sponsors soon followed, drawn by the allure of a bike race held in Brooklyn. RockStar Games, maker of Grand Theft Auto, is the event’s lead sponsor for a second year, joining Giro, Cinelli and Timbuk2, among others crafting specialty gear with Red Hook Crit branding. Working with the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation, Trimble developed the Red Hook Passport to encourage race-goers to learn the neighborhood.

The race itself takes place in Red Hook, a sometimes forgotten but intriguing place that juts into the harbor providing residents and walkers with some of the most beautiful sunlight in the city. Red Hook was especially hard hit by Hurricane Sandy, a point which Trimble has sought to address by assuming the neighborhood’s name for his race.

Separated from the rest of Brooklyn by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the lack of a convenient subway station, Red Hook’s streets are decidedly quiet during the week, a few shops with the trappings of the West Village stand out like curiosities in a place that ranks among the poorest in the borough.

For cyclists like Manderfield, the charm of the Red Hook Crit is the ease with which it gathers the many tribes of cycling. The weekend warrior roadie trades war stories with the indie-rock mountain biker and the high-performance cyclo-cross athlete. For a race unsanctioned by an official cycling body, the Red Hook Crit offers festival seating.

“You have alley-cat racers from New York City, who have tattoos from head-to-toe, and then you have the clean-cut clean shaven track racer,” Manderfield said, who grew up on a velodrome in Michigan and raced collegiately in North Carolina. “They’re two totally different people but it doesn’t really matter because they’re here for the same reason: they love riding their bike. There’s no other event that brings all of those various cycling cultures together in one place.”

Trimble no longer competes in the race (he twice finished second, once to Manderfield), devoting all his waking hours to planning the event, which spread to Milan in 2010 and Barcelona in August of last year. His bike race now has a real-live tour with 30 to 40 racers attending all three races, traveling with the support of cycling gear sponsors. Trimble has plans for crits in London and Berlin. It’s a mini-Grand Prix in the making.

While the Red Hook Crit is decidedly competitive, the modest prize money attracts cycling enthusiasts rather than professional athletes. For the top riders, mostly men in their 20s, the chance to race a bike in some of the world’s most popular cities is sufficient motivation.

“If all of sudden we put $30,000 for first prize, we’d have every doped-up cyclist imaginable trying to race,” Trimble said. “There’s a breed of athlete who just goes and races for money, guys who are most likely to cheat, take drugs. The real value of this is the glory, the street cred and the prizes. It’s not about the money.”

Will Silicon Valley Defend Net Neutrality?

Google, Facebook and Netflix were relatively quiet when the net neutrality framework became law in the US in 2015. Will they get noisier now that it could be dismantled?

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, November 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 favouring 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 colourful 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. this 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. and Verizon Communications Inc., Pai’s former employer, have been clamouring for net neutrality’s repeal ever since Donald Trump’s election handed Republicans majority control of the five-member commission.

But if telecom’s firepower on Capitol Hill is to be met with equal force, it’s unclear whether top executives at Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc., Netflix Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. 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 on 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., 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. while Comcast already owns NBCUniversal — it’s only natural that they’ll play favourites.

Aaron, meanwhile, doesn’t downplay the importance of Facebook, Amazon or Google publicising 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. 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. 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.”

Why Steve Jobs’ Grand Vision for a Breakthrough Apple Product Remains Unfulfilled

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs wanted to remake television. He had a bold vision and though the details are fuzzy, the aim was to create something that would transform the TV experience.

Yet five-and-a-half years after Jobs’ death, Apple still appears to have no immediate plans to make an actual TV in its trademark minimalist style packed with homegrown technology.

Apple’s biggest announcement at its annual developers conference this week was arguably the HomePod, essentially its rendition of the Amazon (AMZN – Get Report) Echo or Google’s (GOOGL– Get Report) Home speaker. The newest innovation to its Apple TV set-top box, by contrast, was that Amazon Prime Video would finally be included.

While the HomePod is new and the actual speaker appears to be of a much higher fidelity than its rivals, it’s not a game-changer.

“Apple is in a position that they haven’t often been in over the past 15 years,” Glenn Hower, a digital media analyst at Parks Associates, said in an interview from Dallas. “Right now, they’re really playing catch-up, trying to make a big splash with home innovations. In some ways, they’re responding rather than innovating.”

In August 2011, just six weeks before Jobs died, the Apple co-founder called Walt Mossberg, the longtime tech columnist, to exclaim that he’d figured out how to remake television. The two men had planned to get together to talk about Jobs’ ideas but the Apple founder died soon afterwards.

In the book Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson shed a bit more light on the TV subject, quoting the iconoclastic inventor as saying, “I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”

Jobs’ vision, Mossberg told a small gathering of attendees at a February ReCode conference, and later on The Verge, was to break down television in much the same way that had remade the music business. TV viewing could be organized by genres or decades or actresses rather than by the age-old construct of networks.

But forcing Time Warner (TWX) or Disney (DIS – Get Report) or Comcast’s (CMCSA – Get Report) NBCUniversal to allow Apple to re-order the presentation of their content was a non-starter. Eddy Cue, Apple’s lead dealmaker, said as much in February, explaining that his company’s ideas around TV had been met with a big dose of resistance.

“There’s technology problems and then there’s content licensing problems, which are of a totally different nature,” Shawn Carolan, a managing partner at Menlo Ventures, an early investor in Roku, Siri and Uber, among many others, said in a phone interview. “Apple is in a funny position because the content people, who have this immense power because of these serial monopolies, don’t want to give Apple a proprietary advantage — they see how their buddies down in the music industry studios got their asses handed to them.”

Facebook-Major League Baseball Is Latest Sign of Streaming Things to Come

Major League Baseball had a terrific season in 2016 as the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series since 1908. Viewership for the seven-game series pitting the Cubs against the slightly less star-crossed Cleveland Indians averaged more than 21 million viewers, with the final game drawing an audience of 25.2 million viewers, the largest since 1991.

21st Century Fox‘s fourth-quarter revenue and profit received a big boost as its Fox network posted advertising sales that exceeded forecasts.

Not every baseball season is likely to be as popular as 2016, however. Some years, baseball viewership slips as teams from small markets advance through the playoffs, or embraceable story lines fail to emerge. The National Football League suffered a decline in viewing during its recently completed season, raising questions about the long-term strength of sports viewership.

With those dips in mind, Major League Baseball was said to be “in advanced talks” with Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, to stream one game per week, according to a report earlier this week from Reuters.

An MLB official declined to comment on the report, while representatives from Fox and Facebook weren’t immediately available for comment.

Streaming a game a week on Facebook stands to benefit both MLB and Fox, which spends billions of dollars each year on the rights to broadcast sports events, by expanding its audience to viewers who might not normally choose to watch a game. At the end of 2016, Facebook said it had more than 1.7 billion monthly viewers worldwide.

Facebook “is where advertisers and marketers want to be, and the company’s continued innovation across its platforms demands more share of the advertising pie, both from traditional avenues and from other digital media platforms,”

“It would be great for MLB to get a huge outlet to distribute their content to a set of audiences they might not have gotten otherwise,” said Shahid Khan, the New York-based founder of media platform and data services provider Mediamorph. “For Fox, if you spend a lot of money on content rights and you’re ad-supported, you need to monetize that content in as many places as possible.” 

A deal between MLB and Facebook would come at a point of sweeping transition in how viewers access television programming, especially sports. Over the past 18 months, Disney has expanded the availability of its ESPN sports behemoth, licensing the network to standalone multichannel streaming services such as Dish Network‘s Sling TV and AT&T‘s DirecTV Now in an effort to win over so-called cord-cutters and cord-nevers who choose not to subscribe to traditional pay-TV.

Sports enthusiasts also have the option of subscribing to streaming services such as FloSports and fuboTV, which has deals with Fox and Comcast‘s NBCUniversal. While FloSports concentrates on niche athletics such as wrestling, track and field and gymnastics, fuboTV’s concentration is soccer from all parts of the world. And while both have less than 1 million subscribers, ESPN’s subscription base had fallen to 90 million at the end of 2016 from nearly 100 million in 2010, according to recent Disney corporate filings. 

The fragmenting of audiences, especially for sports, may be best represented by the success of World Wrestling Entertainment‘s WWE Network, which has grown its standalone streaming service into the fifth-largest in the country, according to a study released in October by industry monitoring group Parks Associates. MLB.tv, incidentally, stands one spot ahead in fourth.

“Cord-cutting is happening, and sports are not immune,” said Martin Floreani, CEO and co-founder of FloSports in Austin, Texas. “There’s a growing disconnect between what cable TV delivers and what people want to have on digital, plus it no longer makes sense for how people want to spend their entertainment dollars.”

Facebook already has begun streaming other sports, having entered into a recent deal with Univision Communications to carry Mexican soccer matches in English. Facebook also has live-streamed soccer matches, basketball and table tennis events, while MLB successfully built one of the most widely used streaming networks in the world, BAMTech, the force behind MLB.tv. Disney last year acquired a one-third stake in BAMTech for $1 billion.

“MLB could be the first major sport league in this country to do a deal, but if Fox has negotiated cross-platform rights, there’s no reason they shouldn’t expand on [other] social media platforms,” Khan said. “Social media used to be a way to drive traffic to your home page or portal, but today social media is the platform.

HUD Calls Out Houston on Tenant Evictions

HOUSTON — After 20 years of renting a beat-up townhouse apartment on Houston’s westside, Mike Lucid was put out on the street in 1993.

Mr. Lucid, along with five other families at the Manor West complex, was summarily evicted without compensation when the owner decided to renovate with federal funds secured by the city.

Now Lucid stands at the center of a high-stakes political shoot-out between federal and city officials.

Federal housing officials say Houston is guilty of ignoring tenant law. Texas’s largest city counters that it is being unfairly dragged into a brawl with muscle-flexing bureaucrats who had better know when to back off.

Federal officials have threatened to cut off up to $37 million in community development money. But last month, the Houston officials blinked first. They forced the developer to pay $48,000 in compensation owed to tenants. But that is only about one-third of the amount owed by law.

Uncompensated tenant eviction happens nationwide with alarming regularity, say past and present US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Typically, a developer receives federal money to rehabilitate a housing complex. The tenants, often poor, are left to find new housing with no help from the government officials whose renovation project left them homeless.

“If someone wanted to investigate, they would find that every major city is having major problems – New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles – the list goes on,” says Harold Huecker, who headed HUD’s Washington, D.C., Relocation and Real Estate division for 18 years before retiring last year.

Deep staff cuts at HUD over the past 15 years have rendered the housing enforcement agency paper thin. Huecker says that the number of HUD officials nationwide knowledgeable about relocation law has dropped to less than 25.

But while most relocation cases are quietly solved between HUD and city officials, the situation in Houston has reached a peak.

Just a month ago, the Feds took the unusual step of sending a letter to Houston Mayor Bob Lanier threatening sanctions against the city because of its “failure” to pay an evicted tenant named Mike Lucid, or provide him with “correct or helpful information.” It was the third letter of its kind in a little over a year, say HUD officials.

“It’s a question of whether the city did something in a timely manner,” said Jim Broughman, director of HUD’s Washington D.C. office of Block Grant Assistance, whose projects often force tenants out of apartment and receive relocation aid. “The city [Houston] has had problems in the past on this issue.”

David Walden, Mayor Lanier’s chief of staff, admits that Houston could have done a better job on the Lucid case but bristles at the suggestion that it is part of a “pattern,” or that HUD will carry through with its threat to withhold millions in community development funds.

“If some regional office wants to start applying sanctions to a local governments they best hope that that doesn’t work in reverse either,” Walden says.

Federal relocation laws were born in the early 1970s after a slew of grim housing studies demonstrated how reckless urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s evicted thousands of people out of older city neighborhoods. The law requires cities to pay anyone removed from their homes because of a federal project.

“There were so many hardships caused by the urban renewal projects, that the government was pressured, rightly, to correct the situation,” said John Davis, a HUD official in Fort Worth, Texas.

With two weeks notice, Mike Lucid became one of those hardship cases. In late-1993, Robert Bobinchuck, the apartments’ owner and a local developer, received federal money to renovate Manor West’s 200 units through a now-defunct city rental rehabilitation program.

But Bobinchuck pushed Lucid and five other families out of Manor West because their incomes were slightly above the $19,020 maximum to qualify them as a low-income residents.

Federal tax-credits are given to developers for each apartment filled by someone on a low-income.

A HUD official called Bobinchuck’s actions “greedy.” The Houston developer did not return phone calls.

Besides receiving $585 moving expenses, Lucid was entitled to 42 times the difference between his rent at Manor West and the rental cost of a new apartment, or about $6,720.

“The city wasn’t going to pay until I complained to HUD and they pressured the city,” said Lucid. In June, he received one-third of the amount promised by law,16 months after it was due.

The payment was made after HUD sent Mayor Lanier a second letter on the case, and Bobinchuck paid the city $48,000 in relocation fees.

Former Relocation Director Huecker says that regardless of whether the developer complies with the law, the city has a contractual responsibility with HUD to insure relocation monies are paid.

“The city of Houston is trying to palm this off on the developer – this is typical in many cities,” says Huecker.

Expressing a common complaint by city officials, the Mayor’s top aide says,”It’s not that they didn’t get anything,” Walden says. “This was more money than you envision paying them in expenses, or enough money for a deposit.”

Trump May Hate ‘The Media’ but Newspaper Stocks Are Soaring

These are curious days for the news business.

President-elect Donald Trump this week took to his Twitter account to call CNN’s Jeff Zeleny a “bad reporter,” alleging the network should have found evidence that he had suffered from voter fraud.

Trump has spent the weeks since the election attacking “the media,” charging that he certainly was a victim of “serious bias – big problem.” Others, however, contend the former reality-TV star received a big boost from hours and hours of free media that benefited both the candidate and the media industry.

CBS (CBS) CEO Leslie Moonves famously said in February that Trump’s surging popularity “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

While Trump’s jabs at The New York Times (NYT)  have tempered since he met with top editors on Nov. 22, the newspaper company’s stock price has been on a torrid rebound, more than 14% since the Nov. 8 election, helping to pare its 2016 decline to 4.6%.

Shares of other newspaper and TV-station groups have similarly soared since Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in an outcome that surprised most forecasters.

Gannett (GCI) , the country’s largest newspaper publisher and owner of USA Today, has gained 12% since the election, while Lee Enterprises (LEE) , a chain of mostly small city publications that’s based in Davenport, Iowa, has surged nearly 33%. Tronc (TRNC) , owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, among other newspapers, has added nearly 14%.

Despite the generally glum picture for print advertising sales, newspaper stocks appear to be benefiting from predictions of deregulation under a Trump presidency and the prospect that a stronger economy could bolster advertising sales enough to moderate the broad-based multiyear decline in print advertising. The benchmark S&P 500 has added roughly 2.5% since the election.

“The stock market is telling us that there’s an increased confidence in the U.S. economy,” said Michael Kupinski, St. Louis-based research director at Noble Financial Capital Markets. “There’s a lot of speculation that deregulation, the prospect of lower taxes, of having an FCC that is more de-regulatory, could benefit newspaper and TV stocks.”

Specifically, Kupinski said, investors are betting that the the Federal Communications Commission will make it easier for TV stations and newspapers in the same market to own each other. Likewise, that TV station groups led by Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBGI) will be successful in their push for the FCC to lift a cap on national coverage above its current 39% of U.S. households.

Sinclair shares are up more than 24% since Election Day.

Newspaper publishers, meanwhile, are faced with two countervailing forces. On one hand, advertising sales from print publications continue to fall, extending a more than 10-year decline. On the other hand, interest in the news business is better than ever. According to ComScore, visitors to many of the country’s top news sites have surged over the past two years.

Unique visitors to The New York Times have jumped 26% over the past two years; USA Today visitors are up 6%, NBC News Digital has gained 16%, and CBS News has climbed 21%. 

“While the newspaper business model has been in secular decline for years, the news business itself is in many ways in robust health,” Barclays media analyst Kannan Venkateshwar wrote in Nov. 23 investor note. “With President-elect Mr. Trump continuing to focus on The New York Times in his Twitter comment, this interest level could sustain for some time.”

The question for publishers is how to translate increased attention to the news with a better picture for advertising sales.

Kupinski pointed out that while overall retail print ad sales at U.S. newspapers stumbled a chilling 19.9% in 2015, the decline has tapered somewhat this year, down between 8% and 12%. That’s progress of a sort.

As for digital ad sales, The New York Times expects it will reach a gain of 6% for 2016, helping to pare an overall drop of 8% for the year. But digital ad sales at the company jumped 21% in the third quarter, and Venkateshwar in a note on the publisher said that “recently we have seen acceleration both at the industry level and the company level.”

Circulation sales also are bolstering the outlook for the Times along with Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post and The Boston Globe. At $15 per month, a subscription to NYTimes.com costs the same as Time Warner‘s (TWX) HBO Now, the preeminent entertainment network. Digital subscriber growth at the Times is forecast to reach 30% in 2016, more than offsetting print’s secular decline.

Newspaper stocks, Kupinski argued, will be particularly sensitive to economic indicators and regulation policy.  Lee and McClatchy (MNI) , he added, also have benefited from reducing debt loads that had hampered their abilities to invest in the digital sides of their businesses. (McClatchy shares have seesawed since the election, adding $1 on Friday to turn positive with a 6.5% gain.)

“The economy growing at a faster clip is very important to a newspaper industry trying to get more growth from digital,” Kupinski said. “If print advertising declines would moderate and digital continues to grow in the high single digits [as a percentage], you could see the industry reach an inflection point where total revenue growth for newspapers actually rises.” 

For newspaper publishers that would be something to cheer about — even if Donald Trump calls them biased.

The Media’s Obsession With the Media’s Obsession With Donald Trump

The media’s compulsive coverage of Donald Trump has come full circle. It’s now about us much as it is about him.

The media — mainstream or otherwise — is plainly freaked and flustered. Despite having given Republican voters boatloads of evidence that Trump’s opinions and temperament place him well outside the GOP or even the country’s traditional criterion for president, the real estate magnate’s inflammatory rhetoric only seems to strengthen his position in national polls.

And with every media takedown, Trump only gets stronger. 

Comments from Trump that media outlets label insensitive or outright racist have had the reverse effect of further engendering the New York businessman with a significant segment of the Republican Party. The media’s impotency to sway voters has left reporters, editors and producers doubting their role as national gatekeeper/fact-checker. Collectively, the media must watch from the sidelines wondering who stole its megaphone.

“The media’s fascination has become reflexive — we’re fascinated by the fact that we’re fascinated by Trump,” Mark Andrejevic, chair of media studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California, said in a phone interview. “The fact that he’s a phenomenon has become a phenomenon itself.”

And for good reason: Even as Trump, the candidate, delivers big audiences for those who cover him, he is increasingly making all media less relevant. 

As the GOP candidates prepare to gather for another debate on Tuesday in Las Vegas, Trump is the choice of a commanding 41% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters in a survey from the Monmouth University Polling Institute published on Monday; he also has the support of 38% of registered Republican voters in a Tuesday Washington Post/ABC poll. Texas Senator Ted Cruz came in second with 15%.

Labeling Mexican immigrants as rapists, attacking John McCain’s war record, spewing sexist remarks about female newscasters and a fellow candidate, or calling for a ban against all Muslims entering the U.S. would normally bounce a candidate from the race. But not this year. 

Trump’s success at the polls has produced reams of media hand-wringing and finger-pointing. CNN’s Dean Obeidallah sounded a popular alarm, declaring himself incredulous that the media can’t seem to nail this guy, a serial “media manipulator.” Callum Borchers of The Washington Post, sought to deflect criticism of the media, arguing that news outlets actually have been very critical of Trump, but that hasn’t hurt his candidacy. Even The Wall Street Journal, that standard-bearer of the U.S. right-wing, appears to be astounded that Trump remains the frontrunner. 

As Andrejevic argues, we seem to be living in a time of post-truth politics. Social media and an overabundance of information has created a framework whereby everyone can have their own opinion, and their own facts. Though Trump may have only a modest grasp of policy, legislative history and world affairs — arguably prerequisites for the job — he rejects the premise that he must accept the traditional parameters of the media-politician relationship.

Demonstrating abilities that belie his lack of formal campaign experience, Trump has amassed 5.3 million Twitter followers thanks in large part to a privileged life lived as a wealthy businessman and TV celebrity who has relentlessly sought the spotlight. Unlike even President Obama, who famously used Twitter and Facebook to run circles around Sen. John McCain in 2008, Trump’s understood almost innately that the impartiality and constrained opinion-making of mainstream media doesn’t travel well on social media.

“Where a news organization concerns itself with a set of self-imposed rules stemming from a sense of responsibility as a complete Source of Information, Trump concerns himself only with the material rules of his context, saying things that he knows will get the most raw response out of the most people,” writes John Herrman at The Awl.

Trump lets fly when other candidates would pull back. When the GOP frontrunner claimed that President Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. or that thousands of people in New Jersey cheered when the Twin Towers fell — memes that have been roundly debunked — it has almost no effect on his political standing.

“Speaking truth to Trump doesn’t have any purchase except to give him more attention, and he’s understood that,” Andrejevic says. “Facts don’t really matter. What matters is a kind of affective attachment to ideas, statements, claims that sit well with cable-news coverage, Internet circulation. He’s mastered that.”

While the media needs Trump to keep the attention of a rapt electorate — 24 million people tuned in to the first Republican debate, a number that has only diminished slightly in subsequent contests — Trump doesn’t really need any one media outlet to keep his machine running. And therein lies the scary subtext of the media’s fraught relationship with the Republican frontrunner: As time passes, the media needs Trump more, and he needs the media less.

“He’s been able to maintain this level of topicality where traditional news outlets, especially broadcasters, need to keep focusing on him,” said Aaron Kwittken, CEO of the eponymous brand and reputational consultancy based in New York. “And every time an individual or a group or an entire country protests one of his comments, that’s another news event.“

The media, diffuse and disparate, beholden to Twitter and the hyperactive news flow of the early 21st Century, are little match. Its role as a standard-bearer of accuracy, expertise and fact-checking has been undercut by years of backlash and a parallel universe that threatens to eclipse its very purpose.

Trump’s ascendancy comes after more than three decades of conservative voters complaining of liberal bias in the media. Publications like The Weekly Standard and The Washington Times and Fox News struck back, igniting a debate that may seem trite in an era of partisan web sites and social media.

Today, it’s not just so-called liberal media that Trump is holding hostage — it’s all media. 

“Trump understands that media coverage isn’t a means to an end — it is the end,” Andrejevic said.

Tronc’s Newspapers Have It Bad Enough Without Messy Ownership Fight

The number of U.S. newspaper jobs has fallen by 56% over the past 15 years, dropping to 174,000 as of September from 412,000 in January 2001, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Newspaper industry businesses fell to 7,623 last year from 9,310 in 2001, a drop of 18%.

The chief culprits are well known. Newspapers lost much of their classified advertising to free services such as Craigslist, and then lost even more ad dollars when marketers pulled back on full-page and half-page print ads for lower-cost and more easily-measured online alternatives.

Like other newspaper owners, Tronc, which officially uses a lower-case ‘t,’ has felt its share of shock from these overarching trends. Ad sales at the company once known as Tribune Publishing dropped 16% in the fourth quarter as revenue for 2016 showed almost no growth compared with a year earlier.

Each of Tronc’s newsrooms has endured layoffs over the past three years, whether at the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune or The San Diego Union-Tribune. All three newsrooms are much smaller than they were in 2001.

Tronc’s media representative didn’t reply to a request for comment on the size of the newsrooms in Los Angeles and Chicago.

Yet unlike any other U.S. newspaper company, Tronc/Tribune has been through the ringer over the past 10 years. Going back to April 2007, the company was taken private by real estate magnate Sam Zell in a transaction that added $8.4 billion in debt to Tribune’s balance sheet at a time when ad sales were plummeting and the company was already carrying about $5 billion in debt.

A lousy financial structure were made worse by questionable management. Zell hired Randy Michaels, a former radio executive and disc jockey, to run the business although he had little if any experience operating a newspaper company. Employees recoiled at Zell’s sexist comments and exhortations to row harder.

Less than a year after the deal closed, Tribune on Dec. 8, 2008, was forced to declare bankruptcy, the largest in the history of the American media industry. Some 4,200 people across the company lost their jobs.

Exacerbating the brain drain, Tribune had little money to invest in its newspapers and television stations — especially in digital. Newspaper companies, not only Tribune, were infamously slow to embrace digital news reporting. Wary about alienating their readers, they mostly chose to post their stories online for free so as not to scare away an audience they’d promised to advertisers.

These days, few newspapers use a paywall, though many more do so than 10 years ago. The Los Angeles Times is among them. Digital-only subscribers at Tronc grew 82% last year to 160,000  — yet that was across the entire company. Digital subscribers to The Wall Street Journal totaled 1.1 million at the end of 2016, up from 828,000 a year earlier, while New York Times Co. (NYT – Get Report) added 276,000 new digital subscribers to its flagship newspaper in the fourth quarter, its largest total since 2011, when it first began offering a digital-only subscription.

Tronc still has a long way to go.

TV Companies Stand to Win Big if Trump Removes Media Ownership Limits

David Smith, president, CEO and chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, the country’s largest owner of local TV stations, called the election of a Republican for president a rare chance to eliminate ownership caps that he said unfairly burden broadcasters when competing for viewers and advertisers against cable TV providers and the digital platforms of Facebook and Alphabet’s Google.

“There’s a really serious opportunity to seek complete deregulation in the broadcast industry,” Smith said on Wednesday an an investor conference hosted by Wells Fargo. “If Donald Trump is as deregulatory as he suggests he is, to wipe away regulations we’re going to be the first industry in line to say, ‘We are the most over-regulated industry that exists in the United States.'”

A federal statute bars broadcasters from owning TV stations that reach more than 39% of U.S. TV households. Sinclair as well as major broadcasters CBS, 21st Century Fox, NBC owner Comcast, Disney’s ABC and station owner Tribune Media have been pressing the FCC to raise or eliminate the cap, in some cases for more than 20 years.

Broadcasters have argued that such limitations in the age of the Internet, when a plethora of news sources are readily available, unfairly limit the size and scope of their businesses

Shares of Sinclair, Tribune Media and Gray Television rose steadily following Trump’s victory amid speculation that a Federal Communications Commission with a Republican majority would loosen media ownership rules, or in the case of the TV station cap, ask Congress to do so. Since Tuesday, Sinclair were gaining 9.4% while Gray was up 22% and Tegna had added 6.7%.  

Smith, 65, who will step down as Sinclair CEO in January after 28 years at the company, was unequivocal when he said Sinclair would seek to “eliminate the cap immediately.”

To be sure, Trump has vowed to stop AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, arguing that a single company shouldn’t be allowed to own so many high-profile media properties. But whether Trump was playing populist or would implore his FCC to uphold media ownership restrictions remains unclear. Less uncertain is that removing the 39% ownership cap likely would spark a wave of mergers and acquisitions among station groups looking to gain scale. Sinclair sees greater reach as essential to spreading out the costs for a business that uses a team of anchors operating out of a studio at the company’s headquarters in Hunt Valley, Md., near Baltimore, to broadcast largely homogenized national news reports to augment the news teams at its approximately 100 local network affiliates nationwide.

Murdoch’s bid places Google-like value on Dow Jones

New York: Rupert Murdoch’s $5 billion (Rs20,609 crore) takeover bid for Dow Jones & Co. values the Wall Street Journal publisher higher than Google Inc., based on a measure used by analysts.

News Corp.’s $60-a-share offer represents almost 40 times Dow Jones’s projected 2007 earnings, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Google, owner of the world’s largest search engine, trades at about 32 times projected 2007 profit.

“Dow Jones’s organic growth doesn’t come anywhere close to Google,” said New York-based UBS AG analyst Brian Shipman, who has a “neutral” rating on Dow Jones stock. “If you’re going to support that kind of valuation, it should have that kind of growth.”

Murdoch is pricing Dow Jones at almost double the valuation McClatchy Co., publisher of the Miami Herald, put on Knight Ridder Inc. last year and that real estate billionaire Sam Zell is offering for Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times.

News Corp.’s bid represents about 17 times Dow Jones’s projected 2007 profit before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, based on estimates by Prudential Equity Group analyst Steven Barlow in New York.

McClatchy, based in Sacramento, California, paid 9.5 times projected profit on that basis for Knight Ridder last year, Shipman said. Zell is offering 10 times earnings for Tribune. Gannett Co., the largest U.S. newspaper publisher, trades at 12 times projected 2007 profit.

‘Hard to Justify’

“Given that you can buy GE at 16 times earnings, it’s hard to justify an acquisition multiple as high as Murdoch’s bid for Dow Jones,” said Robert F. Bruner, dean of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and author of Deals From Hell. “Investors need to ask carefully what synergies might arise from the combination of News Corp. and Dow Jones that could justify the extremely high multiple.”

Toronto-based Thomson Corp., owner of the Westlaw legal database and TradeWeb bond trading network, has put a similar value on London-based Reuters Group Plc, the dominant currency- trading service and operator of 196 news bureaus.

Thomson has offered 8.77 billion pounds ($17.5 billion) for Reuters, or 33 times next year’s estimated earnings and 17 times Ebitda.

Buying New York-based Dow Jones would give Murdoch, News Corp.’s chairman, a global financial news organization to support the Fox business channel he plans to start this year as well as his television and Internet properties in Europe, China and India. Winning Dow Jones also would expand his stable of 170 newspapers to include the Journal, which has the biggest U.S. circulation after Gannett’s USA Today.

Global Organization

“Dow Jones isn’t Google, but for Murdoch it offers a means to become No. 1 worldwide in business news, and business news has become one of the most lucrative magnets for advertisers,” said Ken Doctor, an analyst at Burlingame, California-based Outsell Inc., a market-research company.

News Corp. owns 35 U.S. television stations, the Fox News Channel, film studios and cable-TV and satellite networks in the U.K., Italy and Asia. The company’s newspaper holdings include The Times of London and the New York Post.

Dow Jones rose 55% percent on 1 May, when Murdoch’s offer was announced, while News Corp. fell 94 cents, or 4.2%, to $21.45. Dow Jones fell 45 cents to $51.75 yesterday in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. New York-based News Corp. traded at the equivalent of $21.67 at 12:58 pm in Germany, up 41 cents from yesterday’s close in New York.

Reuters shares surged a record 25% to 615.75 pence on 4 May, after the company said it was approached about a takeover. Reuters shares fell as much as 14.5 pence, or 2.4%, to 587 pence in London today.

Credit-default swaps-based on $10 million of News Corp debt are little changed at $17,000 since it made its bid for Dow Jones, according to Deutsche Bank AG. Credit-default swaps are based on corporate bonds and are used to speculate on a company’s ability to repay debt. An increase indicates a worsening in credit quality.

Journal’s Prestige

Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, competes with Dow Jones and Reuters in selling news and information to the financial services industry.

Murdoch’s interest in Dow Jones centers on the content and prestige of the Journal, said Hal Vogel, a New York-based analyst and author of Entertainment Industry Economics.

News Corp., he said, would probably use the Wall Street Journal to expand business news programming on the company’s television outlets in Europe, through the BSkyB cable network, and in Asia, through Star TV.

“Content is king sounds logical, but if you can’t distribute it, it’s worthless,” said Vogel. “The Wall Street Journal has the ability to produce content, but they don’t have anywhere near the global distribution that Rupert Murdoch has.”

Murdoch, 76, probably sees ways to integrate Barron’s, wsj.com, the MarketWatch financial Web site and Dow Jones Newswires into his broadcast, cable, Internet and print businesses, said Michael Chren, managing director of Allegiant Asset Management Co. in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, which had 780,000 Dow Jones shares as of March.

Tremendous Value?

“It’s very difficult to value the synergies that Murdoch apparently believes can be created,” Chren said. “What is clear is that Murdoch is a strategic buyer coming able and willing to fold Dow Jones into his global media empire and create tremendous value.”

Murdoch spent $580 million in 2005 to buy MySpace.com, the social networking site with $79 million in sales. In 2006, MySpace reached an advertising agreement with Mountain View, California-based Google that will pay News Corp. $900 million over three years.

Murdoch has touted Dow Jones’s success on the Internet as one of the reasons for the offer, News Corp. spokesman Andrew Butcher said in an interview. Dow Jones got 40% of its $1.78 billion in sales last year by disseminating information on the Internet and hand-held devices including mobile phones.

Dow Jones spokesman Howard Hoffman declined to comment.

With $5.4 billion in cash as of 31 December, Murdoch could buy Dow Jones without adding to his company’s $11.4 billion in borrowings, credit rating company Standard & Poor’s said.

Bancroft Opposition

“This is clearly sufficient” to complete the purchase, Standard & Poor’s said on 1 May. S&P has a BBB investment grade rating on News Corp. debt.

Buying Dow Jones at $65 a share would reduce News Corp.’s projected 2008 profit of $1.30 a share by two cents, said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Capital Inc., who rates the shares “buy.”

“Investors have initially disagreed with the vast majority of News Corp.’s acquisitions,” Greenfield wrote on 3 May. “The overwhelming majority have created substantial value.”

Even with the purchase, News Corp. would still be able to buy back $10 billion of its stock in 2008 and 2009, Greenfield wrote.

Members of the Bancroft family, who have controlled Dow Jones since 1902 and hold 64% of the voting power, say shares equaling 52% oppose a sale to Murdoch.

Another block of family shareholders, the Ottaways, who sold their chain of community newspapers to Dow Jones in 1970, said they would vote their 6.2% stake against a sale.

Without a sale, shares of Dow Jones will lose much of the almost $20 they gained when Murdoch announced his bid, said Chren of Allegiant Asset Management.

“If the Bancrofts turn down Murdoch and a deal doesn’t get done, the stock probably falls into the low $40s, retaining some takeout value,” Chren said.

`Zapatista Woodstock’ Gathers Rebels, Students, Activists in Mexican Jungle

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, MEXICO — Just two weeks before the Mexican presidential election, the Zapatista peasant guerrillas are again breaking the rules of Mexican politics.

Seven months after the 5,000-member rebel army surprised the nation by briefly taking over several towns in southern Mexico, the Zapatistas are playing host to a gathering of more than 6,000 people from independent groups and community organizations throughout the country.

The unusual assembly, billed as the National Democracy Convention, is widely seen here as the product of the Zapatista uprising and the maturation of Mexican `civil society.’

“This has been a long time coming, but it is the first true linking of the many groups and individuals that form what we call a civil society,” said Luis Javier Garrido, a political scientisy a the Autonomous University of Mexico.” This meeting never would have taken place if it weren’t for the Zapatistas.'”

The Zapatistas’ New Year’s Day rebellion set the year’s political tone and increased pressure on the government to hold a clean election later this month.

Uncommon mix

While the Zapatistas themselves did not attend the convention on its first day, five workshops around the city were filled with an uncommon mix of students, poor peasants, intellectuals, and workers.

The Zapatista Convention, as attendees call it, fulfills the initial claims by the charismatic rebel leader, Subcommander Marcos, that their uprising was a response not just to local problems in Chiapas, where over 50 percent of the people live in poverty, but to national issues such as political and electoral reform.

Since the Jan. 12 cease-fire that halted the conflict, Marcos has become a celebrity, enjoying visits from well-known intellectuals and foreign journalists. His face, obscured by an omnipresent ski mask, has become an icon of Mexican politics.

But participants here emphasized that their focus wasn’t just on the Zapatistas, but a variety of issues from public health and police brutality to education and the environment.

The Zapatistas, meanwhile, see the hundreds of loosely connected human rights and community groups spread across the country, as their logical allies.

Indeed, the government was forced to call a cease-fire following angry protests that criticized President Carlos Salinas de Gortari for moving heavy weaponry to the region and rocketing civilian areas where Zapatistas reportedly had been seen.

“Civil society awoke on Jan. 1, and with it a citizen consciousness that will translate into the voting booths on Aug. 21,” the Roman Catholic Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia said in a stirring sermon delivered the night before the convention. Bishop Ruiz, who has long come under fire for his support of the Indians, served as a mediator between government officials and the rebel army.

Government counterattack

The Mexican government, meanwhile, is trying to undercut the convention and a surge in public support for the Zapatistas that could turn into votes for opposition candidates.

This past week, the Commerce Secretariat announced a $1.5 billion program to create infrastructure and industrial development projects in Chiapas. The money is earmarked for 19 agriculture, fishing, and maquiladora projects that will create 14,000 jobs, say government officials.

But participants here say that more than money is needed to improve the living conditions of the more than 40 million Mexicans who live in poverty.

Rumors abound that the rebels will break the cease-fire if fraud is widely reported, especially by the independent election monitoring groups who have attended the convention. In a letter sent to Mexico City newspapers last week, Marcos warned that “if the election process proves to be a disaster, it will then be apparent that it was the sole responsibility of the government.”

Opinion here is divided over whether the Zapatistas should remain armed or renounce violence. Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, a Nobel Prize nominee for her work on mothers of “disappeared” children, argues that the government’s action will ultimately determine the Zapatistas’ actions.

“If there is violence after the election, it is because the government cheated,” says Ms. Ibarra.

Today, the convention will move southeast to Zapatista-controlled territory in the Lacandon Rain Forest, and a clearing the Zapatistas named Aguascalientes, after the 1914 convention of revolutionary forces that led to the rewriting of the Constitution.

Many are calling the gathering a “Zapatista Woodstock.” The Zapatistas have been building an amphitheater on the side of the hill. Hundreds of people, young and old, peasant and wealthy, Mexican and foreign, will head into the forest for three nights of camping out with the Zapatistas.

“This gathering may not have a precedent in all of Latin American history,” says Enrique Cemo, a Mexican and an historian at the University of New Mexico. “It is a chance for an armed movement to merge with a strengthening civil society. It has the makings of an extraordinary event.”

Desperate African Refugees Stranded in Spain, Just Short of Europe

CEUTA, Spain — When Mamodu Jalloh left Sierra Leone in May, he had never heard of this Spanish enclave on the tip of North Africa, surrounded on one side by the Mediterranean and on the other by Morocco.

Jalloh, 28, wanted only to escape a civil war that has killed thousands, including his father, in his West African homeland.

The border between Morocco and Ceuta, Spain

He made it to Morocco. But Moroccan authorities, eager to be rid of transients from sub-Saharan countries, dumped Jalloh into this seven-square-mile sliver of Spain to join more than 350 other black Africans in the same plight.

Some of the Africans had been marooned for up to two years in Ceuta (pronounced THAY-oota), a predominantly Roman Catholic city of 75,000 people with a sizable Muslim community and smaller groups of Jews and Hindus.

Unlike Arabs who could blend into the city while trying to find passage across the Strait of Gibraltar to Europe, the blacks stood out and were easily kept track of. They were housed in a decaying 15th-Century fort beside the harbor, but were allowed to move around the city.

Ceuta paid little attention to the homeless Africans until they rioted in October, leaving 50 injured and a policeman with a bullet in his chest. The violence was touched off by the Africans’ frustration over the unfulfilled promises of authorities to move them to the Spanish mainland.

The riot stunned the normally calm city, and Ceuta, like border towns in Germany and Texas, was enveloped in heated debates about immigration. Many people voiced fears of uncontrolled waves of unemployed immigrants and demanded action by the national government in Madrid.

Officials sent more than 200 paramilitary officers of the Civil Guard to patrol the city’s border with Morocco. The line previously had been watched by only a handful of officers, making it an easy crossing point for Arabs and contraband, such as drugs, heading for Europe.

Eight days after the riot, the Civil Guard began putting up a barbed wire barrier that will run the length of the five-mile border.

Authorities moved about 150 of the Africans to mainland Spain, where humanitarian groups and city governments are trying to get them temporary accommodations and even jobs. But the remaining Africans were interned in a makeshift tent camp on a wind-swept hillside and put under heavy guard.

Although Ceuta officials say they sympathize with the plight of the Africans seeking a haven from bloodshed back home, they welcome a recently started $25-million border road and wall aimed at curtailing the flow of illegal immigrants. The project is expected to take two years.

“This city is too small and its economy too fragile to absorb these immigrants,” said Mayor Basilio Fernandez. “This situation is likely to occur again unless new policies are put in place.”

Such talk is bewildering to Jalloh, who says he wants only a safe place to live and a chance to work without the fear of war.

“I had no intention to come to Ceuta,” Jalloh said during an interview in the internment camp. “If my country was safe, I would have stayed. I only want to stay alive.”

Many of the young men with Jalloh talked of the painful irony of surviving beatings, hunger and wounds to escape hard times in their native lands only to find themselves in a precarious state again–this time in Spanish Africa.

Tomas Augustine, 30, fled Liberia for fear he would be killed by soldiers trying to force him to join the military.

“I left like a man running from a burning house,” said Augustine, who weaved through Ghana, Nigeria and Niger, often on foot, before being imprisoned and beaten in Algeria. He eventually was taken to the Ceuta border by a Moroccan acquaintance. “But I am afraid to say that things have not gotten much better.”

Augustine, who studied business administration in Ghana, said the internees fear for their safety since the October violence. “We want to go to ‘the peninsula,’ ” he said, using the local term for the Spanish mainland just 60 minutes away by ferry.

For residents of this ancient city, whose occupiers have included the Phoneticians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Portuguese, the riot signaled problems to come.

Many say that as strife continues in Africa and points eastward, more and more illegal immigrants are likely to try to enter Ceuta under the belief that they can gain access to the European continent.

“We know there will be more coming,” said Alejandro Ciriel, local secretary of the General Workers Union, one of Spain’s two main labor federations. “Europe is in the news, so these people imagine there are many jobs here–but that’s not true.”

Nonetheless, the Africans still in Ceuta hope to go to mainland Spain.

Emmanuel Anderson, a 25-year-old farmer from Liberia, remains nervous, wondering what will become of him and whether he will be forced to return home.

“There is no way I will go back–I must go to ‘the peninsula,’ ” he said. “I want to work. I want a future.”

Hillary: Immigration Reform Could Add ‘Hundreds of Billions of Dollars’ to U.S. Economy

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner and former New York senator, came to friendly territory on Monday to champion the cause of the foreign-born at an annual immigrant advocacy conference held blocks from her national headquarters in Brooklyn.

Though the setting was New York, Clinton was clearly speaking to residents of swing states such as Colorado, New Mexico, Florida and Ohio, each with large populations of recent immigrants when the issue of immigration reform is often a litmus test for political support.

At the annual National Immigrant Integration Conference, which advocates economic, cultural and social assimilation for the nation’s foreign-born, Clinton said comprehensive immigration reform could add “hundreds of billions of dollars” to the nation’s economy. Clinton also said she supported President Obama’s executive orders from Nov. 2014 that would have provided protection from deportation and work permits for up to five million undocumented immigrants.

In a setback to the plan, a federal court in Texas issued an order in February that is likely to block the implementation of programs designed to curb actions that would separate families. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on Obama’s executive orders sometime in the spring of 2016.

On the eve of a Republican debate in Nevada on Tuesday, hosted by CNN, the former secretary of state denounced GOP frontrunner Donald Trump’s recent call to ban Muslims in the wake of the mass murder in San Bernardino earlier this month as well as his earlier labeling of Mexicans immigrants as criminal and rapists.

“We are hearing all kinds of anti-immigrant sentiment in the news right now,” she told a packed hotel ballroom of roughly 1,000 people in downtown Brooklyn. “Candidates for president are calling immigrants drug runners and rapists. They promise if elected to round up and deport millions of people, build a mammoth wall, militarize the border and tear families apart.

“I want to put an end to families being torn apart, or hard-working law-abiding parents having to prepare their kids for the day that Mom or Dad are taken away. That’s why I still passionately support comprehensive immigration reform legislation as a path to full and equal citizenship.”

Clinton also chided Republican presidential candidate Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for backing away from such a bill, the 2013 Immigration Modernization Act, which passed the Senate but failed in the House of Representatives, a victim of Republican leaders opposed to its citizenship provisions for many of the country’s roughly 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants.

That bill, Clinton said, had the support of a wide range of political groups, from labor unions to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“Not a single Republican candidate consistently supports a real path to citizenship,” she said. “Rubio actually helped to write the Senate bill and now he moves away from it. They’re always moving toward the extreme and away from the rest of America.”

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in May showed that 72% of Americans said undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. should be allowed to stay in the country legally as long as certain requirements were met. The numbers climbed to 80% of Democrats, 76% of independents and 56% of Republicans.  

Even as Latinos were credited with helping to re-elect President Obama in 2012, foreign-born citizens as a voting bloc are expected to play an even larger role in determining both the Democratic nominee and the next president. Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley are scheduled to speak on Tuesday at the conference, which brings together immigrant advocates from around the country as well as people from labor union, municipalities large and small, religious denominations, think tanks and universities.

For Theo Oshiro, deputy director of Make the Road New York, a social and economic advocacy group based in Queens, New York, the conference marked a critical step in helping to establish immigrants as political power. 

“There’s been a lot of negative things said about immigrants recently but there’s also others who see that immigrants contribute a great deal to the country,” Oshiro said following Clinton’s 20-minute speech. “If you want to have any staying power politically you need to address immigrants and those who work for immigrants. It says a lot about this moment that this conference had gotten more influence.”

Clinton sought as well to counter the Republican argument that granting asylum to undocumented immigrants would be tantamount to rewarding people for entering or remaining in the country illegally. She called for steps to differentiate between criminals and children covered by the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, better known as the Dream Act.

That legislation, which was also a target of the Texas federal court order, provides opportunities for undocumented children to remain in the country without fear of deportation though it doesn’t grant a path to legalization and citizenship.

“If you work hard and you love this country and you contribute to it and want nothing more than to build a good future for yourselves and your children, we should give you a way to come forward and become a citizen,” Clinton said. “The majority of Americans agree, they know it’s the right thing to do.”

‘Going Clear’ Director Lauds HBO for Backing Film on Scientology

PARK CITY, Utah (TheStreet) — Alex Gibney, the director of a documentary film about the Church of Scientology, credited Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO for staying with the project amid repeated efforts by the church’s leadership and lawyers to prevent the movie from going forward.

“I was thrilled in the legal review process how much they stood behind what we’re trying to do,” Gibney said at the film’s premiere Sunday before a packed audience at the Sundance Film Festival. “The lawyers at HBO have been very helpful and very supportive.”

The film, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, will be released in theaters in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco in the coming weeks before being shown on HBO. HBO officials weren’t made available for comment at the premiere.

The film, which is based in part on Lawrence Wright’s book of the same name, profiles L. Ron Hubbard, author of the book Dianetics and founder of Scientology, which combines science fiction with psychology and unique views on natural history.

Much of Going Clear focuses on the church’s current leader David Miscavige and his aggressive efforts to maintain tight control over the activities of its members as he has sought to maintain Scientology’s tax-exempt status as a religion.

Gibney had worked with Wright on the 2007 Academy Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, which tells the story of an Afghan taxi driver who was tortured to death by U.S. soldiers in 2002 while being held in a military detention center.

Many of the former Scientology members who are featured in Going Clear, including former longtime spokesman Mike Rinder, appeared with Gibney, to answer questions from an audience that gave the film a standing ovation. Rinder has become an activist opposing the church.

“The reason I continue to do this, and why I am so glad the film was made, is that I want the abuses that go on in the church to stop,” said Rinder, who left the church in 2007 after 25 years. “I want the mistreatment of people under the guise of religion to end.”

Gibney acknowledged that he and others connected to the film did take security precautions at the premiere. Recently, the Church of Scientology took out full-page advertisements in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times criticizing Gibney and attacking the film.

“I’ve received many cards and letters from the church, but I saw that as very good publicity,” Gibney said. “There are security precautions, but I wouldn’t say they’re overdone. I’ve done a lot of films about dangerous topics. My view is that speaking out is your best protection.”

Rediscovered Film Noir ‘Private Property’ Gets Second Life

In film, it’s all about distribution.

For more than 40 years, the tantalizing 1960 film noir Private Property, starring Warren Oates, Corey Allen and Kate Manx, directed by Leslie Stevens, was lost. Nothing of the film could be found anywhere. 

And then a few years ago, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, one of the world’s largest collections of moving images, acquired an assortment of works that happened to include a duplicate negative of a movie which establishment Hollywood panned, severely limiting its theatrical run. 

Not only was Private Property denied the industry’s Production Code seal of approval, the precursor to present-day ratings, the Catholic Legion of Decency also condemned the film, which portrayed a woman willingly involved in adultery, two men whose relationship smacks of homoeroticism and a biting critique of the American Dream.

When Dennis Bartok of Cinelicious, a Los Angeles digital production and restoration house, was told by a colleague about Private Property, he pounced at the opportunity to restore the film and produce a digital copy. Private Property was shown publicly in New York this week at the Film Society at Lincoln Center as part of a retrospective on Warren Oates and will run Thursday at the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, Calif.

Later this year, Private Property will get the distribution Stevens could only have dreamed about when Cinelicious markets a Blu-Ray copy of the film and it becomes more widely available on a yet-to-be-named streaming platform. 

“This one is really remarkable because it was such a good film, and such a subversive film, and then to have had it completely slip through the cracks of film history, that’s pretty unique,” Bartok said. “There are many films from the 1920s, 30s and 40s that are lost, but once you get into the late 1950s and 1960s, very few are missing.”

Looking back more than 50 years since the film debuted, Bartok said Private Property could be called one of the first indie films of the modern era.

Stevens, who would later create the sci-fi television thriller The Outer Limits, was looking to make a splash after earning fame with the Broadway comedy The Marriage-Go-Round. Produced on a decidedly low budget of $50,000, Private Property was shot almost entirely at Stevens’ house, which he shared with his then-wife, Manx. The two would divorce shortly after the film, and a couple of years later, Manx would commit suicide.

The film’s plot, Bartok said, was hatched by Stevens and producer Stanley Colbert, a book agent who repped Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, among other titles. Stevens and Colbert were said to have been inspired by the empty house immediately next door to Stevens’ swimming pool. The two men broke into the home and then wondered whether two drifters might do the same.

Stevens, who worked for a time for Orson Welles, then landed cinematographer Ted McCord, who previously had shot Treasure of the Sierra Madre and East of Eden. McCord later would shoot The Sound of Music.

But the real attraction to Private Property may be the debut of Warren Oates, a singular actor of the New Hollywood of the 1960s and ’70s who would create a cultlike following for his performances in The Wild Bunch, Two-Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter.

Oates’ flirtatious guile with Manx is juxtaposed by his rivalry with the seductive and seedy Corey Allen, known for his role as James Dean’s rival in Rebel Without a Cause. Both men struggle to win the ardor of a housewife beset by her husband’s indifference. That Oates’ first major film was lost for decades makes Private Property‘s unearthing something of a phenomenon.

Private Property was released briefly in the U.S. and in a couple of foreign markets, most likely in France and the Netherlands, Bartok said. To most U.S. critics, Private Property was a sleazy exploitation film, though it did generate an enthusiastic following among cinemaphiles and left-leaning intellectuals. The film was released independently through Kano Production in the spring of 1960 though it played in only a handful of theaters.

“It’s this very bleak, savage portrait of the hollowness of the American Dream,” Bartok said. “Kate Manx is living in a beautiful Beverly Hills home, yet she’s desperately unhappy. That was an incredibly subversive thing to say in 1960 — you can have all of that and it doesn’t bring you happiness.”

As a result of its relative lack of success, and possibly Stevens’ own turbulent life, Private Propertywas lost for decades. Owing to good fortune and modern technologies, Private Property will get a second run in movie theaters and a streaming deal that will finally take it global.

Spanish Civil War Volunteers Gather Near Madrid for Emotional Reunion

ARGANDA, Spain – Most have white hair and some walk with canes, but the international veterans of the Spanish Civil War remain as feisty and idealistic as when they volunteered for battle 60 years ago.

“We fought to defend democracy and defeat fascism,” boomed Brooklyn-born Milton Wolff, 81, last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, in which about 3,000 Americans participated.

Members of the Lincoln Brigades

Gathered on a grassy plain along the Jarama River south of Madrid, 370 former members of the International Brigades that fought Gen. Francisco Franco gathered yester day to commemorate their arrival in Spain and pay homage to those killed in the 1936-39 war.

Accompanied by wives, children and friends, the men carried pins and photographs documenting the International Brigades, which often carried the name of a patriot from their homeland.

Volunteers came from most European countries, Canada, the United States, Russia, and Mexico. As a tribute, the Spanish parliament will honor the International Brigades today with a letter allowing them to become Spanish citizens.

Under a sunny sky, Danes, Yugoslavs, Argentines and British embraced. Some wept. As in the war itself, the language barrier was largely overcome by enthusiasm.

During the war, more than 45,000 brigadistas, many without military training, answered the call to defend the liberal government of the Republic against Franco’s military uprising. About 16,000 of them died in the fighting.

“We always felt as if we were internationalists,” said Romanian Mihail Florescu, 85, in Spain for the first time since the war. “Now, we will be as Spanish as we always felt we were.”

Because of an unwritten agreement between political parties in the years following Franco’s 1975 death, the war is a subject put aside for fear of opening deep wounds.

But two elderly Spanish couples attended yesterday’s commemoration, explaining that that they wanted to thank the international volunteers.

“It was so moving then, and it is so moving now,” said Eugenio Celis, 84, his eyes welling with tears. “It really was a worldwide struggle.”

In the mid-1930s, the great threat to to Western democracies was the expansion of fascism, already on display in Germany and Italy.

Fearing the same fate for Spain, volunteers from more than 50 countries came to fight. The International Brigades were disbanded and allowed to leave Spain when Franco’s forces, supported heavily by Germany and Italy, were on the verge of victory.

“That was a very sad and bitter moment,” said Clare Forester, 81, who left Minneapolis at age 22 to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. “But we know now that what we did was right. People wanted democracy, not fascism. We can be proud to have fought.”

If Hillary Is Elected President, Here’s What Happens to the Economy

When it comes to matters of Wall Street regulation, taxes, trade and boosting wages, what would Hillary Clinton do?

Would she mirror her husband Bill, who embraced former Goldman Sachs executive Robert Rubin’s vision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, deregulate the telecom industry and sign the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from government oversight? 

Or would she follow in the footsteps of President Barack Obama, who signed the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on the way to raising taxes on the country’s highest earners for the first time since the late-1990s?

Clinton’s detractors warn that she’ll cave in to the same bankers who hosted her lucrative speeches before their members. The former secretary of state’s unwillingness to make those speeches public bolstered Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders‘ presidential campaign during primary season, giving ample fodder to a movement that has won sizable support for efforts to reshape the country’s banking system.

The former New York senator has sought to deflect warnings that she is loathe to upset Wall Street by touting her support for Dodd-Frank and measures such as strengthening the Volcker Rule, which imposes a “risk fee” on banks that make speculative bets with funds from their own accounts. She’s also said she would seek to pass the “Buffett Rule,” which would close tax loopholes by establishing a higher minimum rate for those in the highest income bracket.

Clinton appears to want to appeal to middle-class voters with retirement savings accounts as well as consumer advocates who warn that the Democratic Party has a history of Wall Street appeasement that rivals that of the Republicans. 

“If she is thinking about a policy issue, she’s going to want to hear from the business side, the consumer side, the labor side, and in that regard, her positions may not be starkly black-and-white,” said Tracy Sefl, a Democratic strategist and former Clinton campaign staffer. “She likes to bring together multiple voices.”

Here’s how Clinton plans to deal with the overarching issues affecting the country’s economy — and what effects her actions will have (assuming she’s able to push her agenda through Congress):

Wall Street Regulation

During the primaries, Sanders was relentless in calling for the breakup of the country’s largest banks. Clinton, on the other hand, has taken a more nuanced approach. While Sanders has said he’d reinstate Glass-Steagall within his first year in office, Clinton has countered that more must be done to regulate hedge funds and other entities within the so-called “shadow banking” system. 

Since clinching her party’s nomination, Clinton’s focus has turned away from the Democratic primary and is now on Donald Trump and the Republicans. It’s a change of course that will allow Clinton to emphasize that while she wants to expand Dodd-Frank, Trump and the rest of the Republican field wants to repeal it.

Coming just seven years after unemployment spiked to 17% in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Clinton clearly wants to run on a platform of tougher Wall Street enforcement. And for good reason. Some 67% of the U.S. populace wants a president who favors stricter regulation of financial institutions, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted in October 2015. Even Republicans to the tune of 58% said they want a candidate willing to toughen Wall Street oversight.

“It’s no surprise that people who were hurt by the crisis want to be protected from Wall Street,” Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a non-profit organization that lobbies for strict enforcement of Dodd-Frank, said in a phone interview from Washington. “Given the hostility of the American people toward financial institutions, no one can get elected, saying they’re going to side with Wall Street.”

And that puts Clinton in a tight position. Her opponents have on numerous occasions called for Clinton to make public the transcripts of her paid speeches to many of the country’s largest financial institutions. The New York Times editorial board in February wrote Clinton should “show voters those transcripts,” and GOP operatives are reportedly searching high and low for indications of what she might have said. Clinton has said she will release the transcripts if and when everyone else in the race follows suit on all of their speeches, but suspicions are high that Clinton doesn’t want those speeches made public for fear they would reveal a politician eager to please bankers.

For her part, Clinton has steadfastly insisted that being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to speak to financial firms doesn’t preclude her from supporting Dodd-Frank or the Consumer Protection Act, the cornerstone of Obama’s financial reforms. In a Feb. 11 debate with Sanders, Clinton said she would seek to re-insert regulations that Republicans took out of the bill in exchange for passage.

First and foremost was a bank tax to help pay to implement the law. Second was the so-called Volcker Rule, aimed at discouraging banks from making risky investments.

“This would be a sensible, moderate way to address banks taking risks,” Jeffrey Frankel, macro-economics professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said in a phone interview from Cambridge, Mass. “Republicans have consistently tried to limit funding on the enforcement agencies, both the Consumer Protection Bureau and existing ones. These are steps to raise a little money for enforcement and tax the riskier activities of the big banks.”

Clinton has also proposed levying a “graduated risk fee every year on the liabilities of banks with more than $50 billion in assets, and other financial institutions that are designed by regulators for enhanced oversight.” Those fees, Clinton says, would be scaled “higher for firms with greater amounts of debt and riskier, short-term forms of debt.” Clinton likens it to a deterrent, a rainy day fund. 

Netflix Makes a Splash at Sundance, Unveils First Film

PARK CITY, Utah — Netflix made its presence known early at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, unveiling a documentary about the singer and activist Nina Simone that marked its first pitch-to-production movie.

The film What Happened, Miss Simone played to a packed audience at the festival’s largest venue, the Eccles Theater, concluding in a boisterous ovation for the director, Liz Garbus, and similarly emphatic applause for its underwriter, the onetime video-streaming upstart based in Los Gatos, Calif.

“This was just a perfect match,” Adam Del’Deo, head of Netflix’s original documentary programming, said in an interview prior to the debut. “It was combination of the story, of Liz Garbus directing it — really the whole package worked for us.”

Netflix is moving from streaming other people’s movies and TV serials to making its own. Earlier this week, CEO Reed Hastings said the company this year plans to triple its production of original content. Del’Deo has been leading Netflix’s recent acquisition of documentaries, including the Sundance title Mitt, about the former Republican presidential

But while Netflix has produced TV serials including House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black — and exclusively released films it acquired — it had never produced a film until Garbus and the production house RadicalMedia approached Del’Deo in the spring of 2013 with a proposal to make a documentary about Simone.

“This is the first film they were ever involved with from the moment of the pitch,” Garbus said in a phone interview. “They are very aggressive with how they look at programming, and it’s great to have that kind of energy behind you.”

Netflix’s expanding presence in making films along with streaming them comes as Amazon announced plans on Monday to produce or acquire 12 films each year in a newly created unit headed by the longtime independent film producer Ted Hope, maker of films such as Eat Drink Man Woman and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. (Netflix is currently making a sequel, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Green Legend.)

And while the notion of Amazon and Netflix entering the film production business may strike fear into the hearts of national theater chains, Keri Putnam, Sundance’s executive director, said he welcomed the new energy and the potential of new money for independent filmmakers. Amazon made clear that it would focus on films that tackle “fresh and daring stories that deserve an audience.”

“It’s great for independent film that there’s more platforms,” Putnam said. “Amazon’s desire to make 12 movies a year is so that they have more original content, and while everyone is competing in serials, they’re now diving into low-budget narrative feature films which so far none of the digital platforms have really embraced yet.”

The battle for films has created the most dynamic market ever for documentaries, said Trevor Groth, Sundance’s director of programming. Up until recent years, Time Warner’s HBO, which acquired How to Dance in Ohio, a film about autistic youth preparing for a spring social that will debut at Sundance on Sunday, had its pick of the top documentaries.

But that has changed as Netflix and Amazon have been joined in the hunt by Vimeo, IAC Interactive’s video-sharing site; CBS Films, a unit of CBS and CNN Films; and Time Warner’s production house.

Sundance’s decision to show Garbus’ What Happened, Miss Simone as its first U.S. film of the festival reflects the acceptance of the documentary as a mainstream movie option, Groth said.

“To be blunt: it’s about damn time,” Groth said. “I could never understand how documentaries could do so well in the festival context and then struggle to get exposure outside of it. That’s changing and that’s nice to see.”

And Netflix appears eager to capitalize on it.

Roger Ailes Leaves Fox News

Fox News said Roger Ailes, the architect and power behind the 20-year-old network, has resigned.

Roger Ailes has left the Fox News Channel a mere two weeks after a former anchor accused the network’s chairman and architect of sexual harassment.

In an emailed statement, Fox News said Ailes, 76, had resigned as chairman and chief executive at Fox News and the Fox Business Network along with his position as chairman of 21st Century Fox‘s (FOXA – Get Report) Fox Television Station group.

Gretchen Carlson and her former boss, Roger Ailes

In an apparent effort to stave off an exodus of employees, especially on-air talent who have expressed their loyalty to Ailes in recent days, Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch will assume the positions of chairman and acting CEO of both networks. 

Murdoch, 85, and Ailes co-founded the network in 1996, building it into a formidable player in Republican Party politics with the influence to make or break politicians as well as sway the country on issues ranging from military spending and gun control to healthcare and tax policies. Both men shared the view that the U.S. media tilted emphatically to the left.

In response, Ailes and Murdoch built a network that unapologetically shouted from the right. Its moniker of “Fair and Blanced” infuriated critics as much as it emboldened the network’s devotees. In the process, Fox News became a financial powerhouse within Murdoch’s media empire, accounting for about 20% of the company’s annual operating income, or roughly $1.6 billion in earnings excluding some costs, according to SNL Kagan.

“Roger Ailes has made a remarkable contribution to our company and our country,” Murdoch said in the statement. “Roger shared my vision of a great and independent television organization and executed it brilliantly over 20 great years. Fox News has given voice to those who were ignored by the traditional networks and has been one of the great commercial success stories of modern media.”

Ailes rapid downfall was both surprising and stunning in its scope, and its timing, coming as it during during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, made it likely to be as much of a talking point in political circles as Donald Trump’s scheduled acceptance speech later in the day.

Pressure on Fox to orchestrate Ailes exit rose in recent days as other women who worked at Fox News came forward to describe similar experiences of sexual harassment as those cited by former anchor Gretchen Carlson in a lawsuit filed in New Jersey on July 6.

The final straw appeared to be reports that Megyn Kelly, the network’s rising star, told lawyers hired by the company to investigate Carlson’s accusations, was one of those women. Kelly apparently told lawyers from the New York firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrisonthat Ailes had sexually harassed her roughly 10 years ago when she began work at the network as a correspondent. Kelly’s allegation was first reported by New York magazine.

Carlson, in her lawsuit, alleges that ailes “sabotaged her career because she refused his sexual advances and complained about severe and pervasive sexual harassment.”

When Carlson met with Ailes in fall 2015 to discuss what she described as a pervasive culture of sexual harassment, she charges that he said, “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better,” adding that “sometimes problems are easier to solve” that way.

In a statement, Carlson’s attorneys, Nancy Erika Smith and Martin Hyman, said Carlson’s actions has caused a “seismic shift in the media world.”

“We hope that all businesses now understand that women will no longer tolerate sexual harassment and reputable companies will no longer shield those who abuse women. We thank all the brave women who spoke out about this issue,” they said.

For observers of 21st Century Fox, Ailes’ resignation reflected the increasing prominence of Murdoch’s sons Lachlan and James in the company’s day-to-day operations. As Fox’s executive chairman and CEO, the brothers were said to be eager to both assert their roles within the company as well as demonstrate that they were taking steps to address complaints about workplace conduct.

“Our talented Fox News and Fox Business colleagues, up and down the organization and on both sides of the camera, have built something that continues to redefine the cable news experience for millions of viewers, Lachlan and James Murdoch said in the statement. “For them, as well as for our colleagues across our entire organization, we continue our commitment to maintaining a work environment based on trust and respect. We take seriously our responsibility to uphold these traditional, long-standing values of our company.”

NBC, MGM Have No Plans for New ‘Apprentice’ Episodes

NBC’s “The Apprentice,” which helped catapult Donald Trump into the White House, has been all but cancelled amid a steady decline in ratings and its close association with the reality-TV show’s contentious former host.

Neither NBC, a unit of Comcast Corp. (CMCSA – Get Report) , nor Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., which owns rights to the show, have any plans to produce any new episodes of “The Apprentice” or “The Celebrity Apprentice”, shows that made the real estate developer millions of dollars and helped catapult him into the White House, according to sources close to the matter.

Ratings for “The Apprentice” and its spin-off, “The Celebrity Apprentice,” had been been declining in recent years, a trend underscored by “The New Celebrity Apprentice” hosted by Arnold Schwarzenegger, which attracted the smallest audience of any of the serials 15 seasons during an eight-week run that ended in February.

By declaring his candidacy and foregoing the possibility of further seasons of “The Apprentice,” Trump may have lost out on millions of dollars. In a 2015 filing with the Federal Election Commission, Trump said he earned nearly $214 million over the course of 11 years a host of both shows. 

Yet NBC and MGM have largely moved on from “The Apprentice,” the brainchild of the star reality-TV producer, Mark Burnett. Both companies have assembled long pipelines of dramas and reality-TV productions, precluding any need to green light another season of the franchise despite it having been a mainstay of NBC’s prime-time schedule for more than a decade.

“There are no plans to put it back into the slate anytime soon,” said one of the sources. 

Renewing “The Apprentice” has also been complicated by Trump’s election to the presidency, said one of the sources. A string of controversies that began early in his presidential campaign made “The Apprentice” less attractive given its close association with the New York businessman, said one of the sources.

The decision by both media companies to pursue other projects, however, was made well before the recent backlash against the president’s claim equating American Nazis and Klan followers with those who rallied against them in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this month, said the sources. NBC cut ties with Trump in June 2015, shortly after he  announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination by declaring that  “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people that have lots of problems…They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

At that time, NBCUniversal also terminated a joint-venture with Trump to air the Miss Universe and Miss USA beauty pageants. NBC and MGM declined to comment on plans for “The Apprentice,” or its spin-offs.

For 14 seasons, Trump hosted “The Apprentice” and its spin-off, “The Celebrity Apprentice.” Ratings peaked early as the show’s total audience at its debut in 2004 exceeded 20.7 million, surpassed by only “Sunday Night Football,” according to Nielsen. Though viewership for “The Celebrity Apprentice” would total 9.1 million in 2011, the show’s popularity has subsided in recent years, slipping to under 6 million viewers in 2013.

Trump’s last appearance as host came in February 2015, four months before announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. More recently, the president took home an undisclosed amount of money for an executive producer credit for “The New Celebrity Apprentice” with Schwarzenegger, a former California governor, film actor and world champion body builder.

If Trump had not opted for a career in politics and had convinced NBC and Burnett to produce another season of “The Apprentice,” he stood to earn millions of dollars.

To be sure, Trump’s businesses have benefited from his election victory. His resorts, hotels and restaurants have increased membership fees and enjoyed higher occupancy rates as a result of him becoming president. Trump has also used the presidency to publicize his various businesses, including a winery near Charlottesville, Va., which he cited at the end of an Aug. 16 press conference held at the Trump Tower in Manhattan.  

For NBC, a new season of “The Apprentice” has become less important given the success of its Universal Television Alternative Studio, a one-year-old facility that serves as the headquarters for the company’s reality-TV productions. NBC and other media companies are producing more of their own shows in-house in order to control costs and streaming rights.

School-Prayer Dispute Divides Bible Belt Town

SANTE FE, TEXAS — In a town one local clergyman calls the buckle of the Bible Belt, a lawsuit challenging the use of prayer at school functions has stirred the passions of this working-class, rural Texas community – and placed it on the cusp of the national debate over religion in the classroom.

Unless a last-minute agreement can be reached today between the Santa Fe School Trustees and a Galveston lawyer working with the American Civil Liberties Union, the case is likely to end up in federal court.

The dispute centers on prayers read at graduation ceremonies and before football games, as well as the distribution of Bibles on school campuses. Although such practices are common in the South, school officials have taken the unusual step of allowing students to decide how much religion to put into invocations.

”Maybe all this has gotten out of control,” says the Rev. Shawn Brewer, a thirty-something pastor of the Arcadia First Baptist Church, a low-lying brick building along Route 6, the town’s main drag. ”But most people here believe that if 90 percent want prayer, and 10 percent don’t, that the 90 percent shouldn’t be told they can’t pray. That’s just not democratic.”

Just what the majority believes or whether that even matters is part of the controversy. Anthony Griffin, a Galveston lawyer representing four Santa Fe students and their parents, charges that Brewer and the School Trustees have created a school atmosphere that is nothing short of a ”tyranny of the majority.”

In April, Mr. Griffin filed a civil action in US District Court in Galveston contending that prayers read at the June graduation ceremony, and before each home high-school football game, endorse one religion over others, and therefore are unconstitutional. He also cited the distribution of Gideon Bibles on school grounds as a violation of the separation between church and state.

”This lawsuit is about keeping school districts out of the prayer business,” Griffin says. ”We’re very concerned that these practices chill the rights of those who are not in the majority.”

A majority of the residents of this community 45 minutes from Houston are Baptist. About 90 percent of the town is white. Many of its 9,000 residents work in the oil refineries in Texas City, or up the road at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Santa Fe sees itself as a middle-class bedroom community.

Debbie Mason, a homemaker whose daughter will be a senior when the 1,160 students at Santa Fe High School begin classes in three weeks, says the town is more religious than others along the Texas coast.

”People are much quicker here to say they’re Christian, or in the Christian Right. That didn’t always happen,” Mrs. Mason says.

Using the name Jesus Christ in school prayers at graduation ceremonies, or before football games, unquestionably the best attended civic event, has long been a common practice in Texas, Mason adds.

Not surprisingly, in recent weeks the lawsuit has become a hot topic at school board meetings, at one of the town’s 25 churches, and at the popular Busy Bee Diner. Much talk has gotten personal – and loud.

Margaret Snively, another parent, says people see the lawsuit in black-and-white terms. While one side yells ”heathens,” the other answers with the label ”right-wing zealots.” Santa Fe Superintendent Richard Ownby, who says he is trying to remain impartial, acknowledges that ”everybody has a pretty strong opinion about this.”

Hoping to find a compromise and cool public sentiments, Galveston District Judge Sam Kent plans to meet with both sides today in an effort to head off a court case – and begin the school year smoothly.

Judge Kent is no stranger to putting out Santa Fe fires. Last June, shortly after the lawsuit was filed, he instructed school administrators to require that the students chosen to read the invocation at graduation restrict their prayer to ”nonsectarian, non-proselytizing” language. Kent was said to be following an earlier federal court ruling.

Although the two Santa Fe students chosen to read the invocation largely stayed clear of conspicuously religious language, one prayer did end with a reference to Jesus Christ. Even with television cameras recording the proceedings, many agreed the ceremony went off quietly.

But school trustees weren’t satisfied. In an apparent spurning of Judge Kent’s decision, the seven-person board voted July 24 to allow students to write an invocation, and prayers before football games, however they choose. The trustees emphasized students wouldn’t be restricted to ”non-sectarian or non-proselytizing language.”

Hedging their bets, the school board approved a backup policy mirroring the judge’s initial order. Howard Frels, a Houston attorney representing the school board, argues that giving the students the choice to formulate the invocation prayer satisfies community standards and gives students the chance to decide for themselves. ”It’s a freedom of speech issue,” Mr. Frels says.

Roland Morales, who will be a senior at Santa Fe High School when classes begin Aug. 16, echoes a common student response to the issue, arguing against prayer restrictions. ”If someone wants to pray, fine. If they don’t want to, That’s also fine,” says Morales, stepping into his red pickup truck. ”The students should decide.”

Griffin, though, sees the trustees’ new policy as inflexible. Students, he argues, will be easily swayed by family, friends, or even ministers. He sees a court case brewing: ”It’s still a voice of tyranny, and we’ll fight that.”

Small Towns Seek to Own Broadband Despite Opposition from Telcos

James Sposto and his wife, Caroline, moved their Web design company to this rural Pennsylvania Dutch town, drawn by its bucolic surroundings and its ambitious plan for its own state-of-the-art communications network.

Kutztown, with a population of 5,000, had grown frustrated that its local telecom providers were slow to offer residents, and especially businesses, the kind of high-speed Internet access commonly available in urban centers.

So Kutztown launched its communications network in 2002, financed by a bond offering and a loan from its municipal electric utility. The Spostos’ firm now buys business-class Internet service for $40 a month. That is about half the price paid by businesses in neighboring communities for comparable service, but at a slightly slower speed, provided by regional Service Electric Cablevision.

Kutztown uses a broadband fiber-optic network that allows faster connections than those customarily available from either DSL or cable modem.

But if the country’s telephone and cable TV companies have their way, cities and towns eager to emulate Kutztown will find it difficult, if not impossible, to establish municipal communications utilities.

This spring, telecom giants SBC Communications and Verizon Communications, along with cable providers such as Comcast and Mediacom Communications, lobbied 12 state legislatures–including Illinois’–to urge passage of laws restricting municipalities from building such networks. Fourteen states, including Wisconsin and Missouri, limit or prohibit cities and towns from pursuing such enterprises.

Belief in better service

Industry opposition to municipal broadband is rooted in the belief that the private sector delivers services better than government and that government-owned businesses discourage private-sector investment, said Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Progress & Freedom Foundation, a think tank funded by telecommunications companies.

Thierer argues that even in rural towns, where it is not feasible to build a broadband network, telecoms want to preserve the opportunity to enter such areas once it becomes cost-effective.

Link Hoewing, a Verizon policy director, added that municipalities also can raise money in ways private companies cannot. Any municipal project, Hoewing said, “undermines the market.”

Municipalities can offer Internet access at lower prices than most telephone and cable TV companies because they are not under the same financial pressures as public companies, which often are owned largely by institutional shareholders, said Jim Baller, a Washington-based attorney representing municipal utilities.

But for communities without access to affordable broadband services, municipally owned communications networks are seen as a compelling option.

“Local governments want to bring real high-speed Internet to their towns, and rather than agree to compete, incumbent telephone and cable companies are saying, `No, we won’t allow it,'” said Gerard Lederer, a lawyer representing the National League of Cities.

Municipal broadband initiatives have been increasing at a time when the U.S. has fallen to 13th among industrialized nations for broadband access per capita, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations organization.

Enticed by the potential of wireless “go-anywhere” networks, commonly called Wi-Fi, a growing number of cities, led by Chicago, Minneapolis and Philadelphia, are exploring ambitious projects that would create hundreds of “hot spots,” or areas where the Internet can be accessed wirelessly.

In Chicago, Ald. Edward Burke (14th) and Ald. Margaret Laurino (39th) have proposed a citywide Wi-Fi network. Burke estimates the network would cost $18 million.

Though Wi-Fi generally carries less capacity than fiber-optic lines, it also requires far less construction. For that reason, Western Springs, Ill., Chaska, Minn., and Addison, Texas, are among a growing number of communities building networks.

Illinois state Sen. Steve Rauschenberger (R-Elgin), who opposes such projects, introduced a bill that would have barred municipalities from establishing a communications utility. It died in committee this year, as did a similar bill in Indiana.

According to Rauschenberger, “Municipalities do a good job on low-tech operations, but the expansion into volatile high-tech networks may not be in the best interest of municipal taxpayers.”

But Jaymes Vettraino, Kutztown’s city manager, bristles at the suggestion that municipalities can’t decide for themselves.

Vettraino argues that a Pennsylvania law, passed in December at the urging of Verizon and Comcast, hurts the very rural areas that could be helped by owning and operating communications systems. The new law gives local phone companies the right to scuttle a city or town’s broadband plans provided that they agree to build a sufficiently extensive network within 14 months. A city could build its own network only if a telephone company declined.

Municipalities, Vettraino said, do not take on a project such as broadband simply to save local residents a few dollars. More important, he said, is the ability to tailor the system to recruit new businesses, enable existing ones and help speed government services.

“People in state capitals shouldn’t be able to come down on a community claiming they know better than local residents what is best for a local community,” he added.

Web designer Sposto agreed.

Making towns `attractive’

“A rural town like this one has a responsibility to make itself attractive, and communications is a great way to do it,” he said.

The new Pennsylvania law grandfathered Kutztown and also established a side agreement that allows Philadelphia to move ahead with a plan to cover its 135 square miles with a wireless network. The network would be free in public areas and available for a fee in homes and businesses.

Much of industry’s opposition to municipally owned communications systems centers on the use of surplus money generated by other city-owned utilities, such as electricity.

At a recent Senate hearing on its planned $14.7 billion purchase of AT&T Corp., SBC Chairman Edward Whitacre Jr. said of municipalities, “They’re the ones that make the laws, the rules, charge franchise fees, etc., etc., and then to compete against us makes it an unfair competition.”

But Betty Zeman, marketing manager for Cedar Falls Utilities, which oversees that Iowa city’s broadband network, calls Whitacre’s charges “typical overstatement.” States and the federal government are the main regulators of telecom providers, not municipalities. While cities and towns set franchise arrangements, municipally owned systems adhere to those same requirements.

“The idea that we have all these advantages not enjoyed by private companies is simply untrue,” she said.

Cedar Falls, like Kutztown, owns its electricity utility. Both are rural towns that built electricity and water systems about 100 years ago to serve communities ignored by the large electricity operators of the day.

Cedar Falls decided to build a broadband network in 1995 after the existing cable TV provider balked at extending fiber-optic lines to a fledging industrial park. To finance the network, the city issued $3 million in general obligation bonds and borrowed $3 million from its electric utility. Zeman said the communications utility is paying both debts on schedule at market rates.

But bills before the Iowa legislature, promoted by Qwest Communications and Mediacom, would preclude municipalities from issuing non-taxable general obligation bonds for a municipally owned communications service, thereby making it difficult if not impossible for cities to launch a communications utility. Financing would be limited to revenue bonds that would require a 60 percent supermajority in a public referendum. The Iowa House recently passed the bill, but it is considered unlikely that the Senate will vote on the legislation before the legislature adjourns for the year later this month.

“As it stands, the playing field is tilted toward municipal utilities,” said Jon Koebrick, Mediacom’s senior director of government relations.

Zeman chuckles at such allegations, noting that private companies such as Mediacom regularly raise non-taxable funds by selling company stock.

“The phone and cable companies would rather enjoy their monopolies than compete,” she said.

Can Jack Dorsey’s Square Succeed in Micro-Lending to Food Carts and Shop Owners?

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square, is certain he’s well on the road to remaking commerce in the 21st century.

His digital payments and services company has become enormously popular with small-business owners, especially those who work outside of a traditional office. For self-employed merchants, Square’s wireless dongles have made it possible to accept credit card payment wirelessly, bolstering sales for everyone from food truck vendors to locksmiths making house calls.

While few doubt Dorsey’s hardware offers great promise, his San Francisco company has struggled to convince investors that Square has the resources to compete with similar services from Apple, PayPal Holdings and First Data, among others. Dorsey also has had to calm fears that his second job as CEO of Twitter is diverting his attention away from Square.

Square CEO Jack Dorsey

Questions also have been raised about the sustainability of its micro-loan program, Square Capital. Square makes cash advances and direct loans to some of the more than 2 million users of its payment devices. These borrowers use its software to manage inventory and analyze sales data, affording Square insights into how they’ll handle a cash advance or a loan.

Dorsey was in Boston this week along with his finance chief, Sarah Friar, to assuage investors who turned on the shares earlier this month when Square reported that loans and cash advances to clients increased just 4% in the first quarter to $153 million because of “challenged credit market conditions.”

Analysts were expecting a higher growth rate. Square shares tumbled 22% on May 6, after it reported earnings, and the stock has declined 24% this year.

One concern about Square Capital is the quality of its due diligence. “We believe the exclusion of cost data, balance sheet data and management qualifications, combined with sales data that only spans an economic boom, severely limits the underwriting quality for [merchant loans],” Wedbush Securities technology analyst Gil Luria said in an investor note Tuesday.

Secondly, Luria disputed Square’s insistence that repeat loan business is a sign of healthy growth. Instead, Luria argued, a small-business owner coming back for a small loan “may be a red flag.”

The reasoning behind the loan program is a good one. “Small businesses just don’t have access to capital,” Friar said at JP Morgan‘s annual telecom, media and technology investor conference in Boston on Tuesday. Square’s average loan size is $6,000 to $10,000, indicating the financing is aimed more at cash flow than seed money.

Square uses third-party investors to underwrite the loans and advances, and Friar said it has secured two more investors for the program.

“By having a stronger spotlight on the lending space, it’s allowed us to really tell our story,” she added, referring to the fallout following the release of Square’s first-quarter earnings report. “From the install base to the data that helps us underwrite loans to the way it’s cohesively linked into our platform, we’ve seen really strong customer interest.”

Unfortunately for Square, its loan program has been met with confusion and doubt, BTIG financial analyst Mark Palmer wrote in an investor note on Wednesday. The confusion, he said, stems from how Square’s lending practices differ from those of a traditional bank. 

For one, Square gets its cash advances repaid each time a client uses its service to swipe a credit card, about 2.75% of its sale. Additionally, Square doesn’t use interest rates on loans, Palmer explained, but instead charges a one-time fee. Square is emphasizing loans over cash advances to allow businesses to pay off their debt more quickly.

“While investor demand for Square Capital’s loans remains the key to the platform’s viability, we believe Square’s unique access to the operating data of its applicants that facilitates better credit decisions and low defaults … translates into a compelling investment opportunity,” Palmer said.

Square’s recent market troubles might simply be an issue of communication or legitimate concerns about a startup entering a business as risky as banking. The Great Recession took down Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, each many times larger than Square. 

Nonetheless, investors also have grown impatient with the company’s long slog to profitability. While sales jumped 51% in the first quarter to $379 million, beating analysts’ expectations of $345 million, Square reported a wider-than-expected loss of 29 cents a share. In Boston on Tuesday, Friar reiterated that Square’s 2016 earnings excluding some costs would “break even.” 

Ironically, shares in the company surged Tuesday after investment bank BTIG raised its rating on the stock and tossed out the possibility that “a takeout at a healthy premium is a real possibility.” Short-sellers who have been circling Square for months were forced to buy shares to cover potential losses as Square jumped 7.2% to close at $10.14. (Shares were off slightly on Wednesday afternoon to $10.07.)

Friar, reflecting the unflappable demeanor of her boss, seemed unfazed by concerns over Square’s lending program, its march to profitability or the roller-coaster performance of its stock price.

“We’re still looking at the market opportunity ahead of us, which is still massive,” she said. “We want to be mindful to grow in a way that can appreciate, so we will continue to invest to grow, but we’ll do it mindfully and let some of that profitability start to show through starting now in 2016.”

That’s something investors would like to see.

Trump, Cruz and Sanders: Tax Plans Tell the Story

It’s not a sexy topic, but tax reform gets to the heart of the divide between Trump and Cruz, Clinton and Sanders.

Radical proposals in tax policy might be non-starters for some, but Dave Camp, the former Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, says he’s encouraged by the ambitious tax plans coming from the leading presidential candidates of either party. Both the Trump and Sanders campaigns, he said, have highlighted deep frustration with economic policy, and tax reform, he says, can address this anger.

“What you’ve gotten are campaign proposals that aren’t necessarily legislative proposals,” Camp, currently a senior policy advisor to PriceWaterhouseCoopers‘ tax policy practice, said in a phone interview from Washington. “While the concerns they’re raising are somewhat similar, the solutions are different, but I do think there’s a common sense that our tax code is broken.”

In an effort to fix that tax code, Camp delivered a far-reaching 194-page tax reform proposal to his Republican colleagues just prior to leaving the House in 2014 after 12 terms in Congress. Camp’s plan, though, was dead-on-arrival for a Republican leadership that viewed his proposal as either too harsh on corporations and wealthy individuals, or a needless opportunity for President Obama to fashion another piece of landmark legislation. There hasn’t been a comprehensive overhaul of the U.S. tax code since 1986.

While Camp’s plan is worth rehashing, the root of the tax reform debate is really a question of whether cutting taxes generates economic growth, and whether federal policy address income inequality. In light of voter attention to stagnant wages, politicians on both sides of the aisle have acknowledged that income inequality isn’t good for the future of the U.S. economy.

When I asked Camp whether tax cuts spur growth, he cited the work of Larry Lindsey, the George W. Bush economic adviser turned Washington consultant who was once as central to policy debates as Elizabeth Warren. Lindsey was the engine behind the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, arguing that given more money, the wealthy and corporations will energetically invest in growing the economy. Not everyone agrees with this contention. A recent report on 65 years of economic data around taxes and economic growth showed that there’s much more to growth than tax policy and that cutting taxes has often coincided with slowed growth. 

Republicans led by Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul early in the presidential campaign called for cutting the corporate tax rate in half. Camp’s Tax Reform Act of 2014 proposed dropping it to 25% from 35%. 

U.S. companies routinely cite the 35% tax on income earned abroad as the reason they choose to keep more than $2 trillion in tax havens rather than repatriating that money back to the U.S. Unlike most developed countries, the U.S. taxes corporate income earned in the U.S. at the same rate as income earned abroad.

Camp’s plan would establish a permanent non-U.S. corporate rate of 8.5% (though others have suggested 10%). To maintain the current system, he said, is to invite more of the tax-avoiding corporate inversions that Clinton, Sanders, and Trump have condemned.

“We can’t continue on the path where we’re so different than rest of the world, or we’ll continue to see corporation re-domicile to other countries,” Camp said. “By making these changes, we could actually grow the economy, increase revenue to the government, increase jobs and increase incomes for individuals.”

Leading Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, were she elected president, has said she would only agree to a corporate tax reform that was revenue-positive. In other words, getting corporations and wealthy individuals to pay more, overall, not less then they do currently. Camp admitted his plan may or may not be revenue-neutral, depending on how it’s evaluated.

But if the corporate rate is to be lowered, or even cut for non-U.S. profits, Democrats are going to want to address a host of income tax deductions that Camp acknowledged are used almost exclusively by large corporations and wealthy individuals to pay less taxes.

Chief among them is the “carried interest” tax loophole that allows private equity partners to treat their income as capital gains. Camp’s plan called for its removal while also raising taxes on large banks, eliminating some restrictions on self-employed individuals from avoiding income taxes and requiring some high-income individuals to pay taxes on municipal bonds.

Camp also proposed slapping a 10% surtax on some joint-incomes greater than $450,000 a year, more progressive than a proposal than Clinton made in January. (Hers called for a 4% tax on incomes over $5 million.)

Democrats are certain to like all of that. But can compromise between the parties be made when ideologies are so far apart? Here are some facts:

Last year, corporate income tax revenue was 1.9% of GDP. In 1952, it was 5.9%, according to a study by the liberal Economic Policy Institute. During that time, corporate taxes as a portion of federal revenue has dropped to 11% from 32%, according to an Oxfam study published on April 14. Meanwhile, the top 1% of earners take home more than 20% of the country’s total income, and their share has more than doubled over the past 35 years.

Camp pointed out that median income has been flat for a decade while economic growth has averaged a tepid 2%. Out of Congress, yet still lobbying for his goals, Camp says the next administration is likely to produce a “significant tax bill” in its first year.

The question is whether there will be a political climate to enact it.

“Maybe when we get to the fall, we’ll see a discussion of tax policy emerge again because it’s so important to why so many people think the country isn’t going in the right direction,” he said. “Jobs and the economy will be a key issue, and tax reform is one thing that can help with that.” 

Leon Lazaroff