David Dayen at The New Republic writes—The Free-Trade Consensus Is Dead:
Speaking on Monday at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman made a familiar argument. The Obama administration has used trade agreements to reshape globalization in the best way, he said. We’ve put labor and environmental standards at the core of the deals, he claimed, and we’ve created a level playing field for U.S. workers.
Froman’s timing was unfortunate. The same day, documents leaked by Greenpeace Netherlands revealed that U.S. negotiators working on a trade deal with the European Union have actually been pressuring their trading partners to lower those same standards.
This distance between Froman’s words and the contradictory reality is at the heart of the disintegration of the global trade consensus. The 2016 presidential election has focused heavily on trade agreements, and the leading basher of them is now the Republican nominee for president. We’re seeing something similar on the Democratic side: You can argue that Hillary Clinton has not moved on any major issue as much as she has moved on trade agreements, publicly opposing a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement she enthusiastically promoted as secretary of state.
Laura Reston at The New Republic writes—What Happens When Trump Dials Back the Crazy?
Steering clear of the “safe course” has fueled Trump’s campaign all along—and now it’s boosted him to the Republican nomination. But his erratic, “I’ll say anything” persona could be more of a liability than a boon in the general election. In the coming months, Hillary Clinton and her allies will do everything in their power to paint Trump as dangerously unhinged. They got started on Wednesday, just hours after Ted Cruz abandoned the race and cleared the way for Trump to become the nominee, releasing a witty, highly shareable video that shows prominent Republicans like Mitt Romney calling him a “con artist,” “phony,” “bully,” and “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency.”
Trump needs to show that he has a softer and more rational side, and he’s been assuring supporters—and skeptical Republicans—that he can, and will. But there’s a hitch, as he well knows: The more Trump sounds like a traditional politician, the more he risks losing the fervent support of people who like him because he’s anything but a traditional politician.
Wendy R. Davis at The Guardian writes—I've been in your position, Ted Cruz. Here's some post-campaign advice:
Your work friends are the perfect segue into my last bit of advice: embrace your job and work hard upon your return. I am sure that, like me, you embrace the calling to public service. While I had to resign from the Texas State Senate to run for governor, you didn’t have to leave the U.S. Senate to run for president.
That’s great! It means you can jump right back into the critical work of legislating. With all the work that the Senate is doing right now—meeting with appointees to the US Supreme Court and holding hearings to confirm a new Secretary of the Army, passing budgets—wait, none of that is getting done. Well, you will fit right back in nonetheless given your penchant for shutting down the government when you don’t get your way.
Perhaps 2017 will be better; think of how busy you’ll be battling all those gender equity initiatives that Hillary Clinton will launch as president, advancing the revolutionary ideas of equal pay, reproductive autonomy and family leave policies!
As for me, I’ve been hard at work since my own run to build Deeds Not Words, a community of millennial women passionate about creating positive change (hopefully one of them will one day maneuver to take your job). In the meantime, though, think how fortunate you’ll be to tell your grandchildren one day that you had the honor of serving under your nation’s first woman president.
John Stoehr at The Washington Monthly writes—There’s No Such Thing as Not Voting:
Voting is a political strategy. It’s civic participation. It’s about citizenship, not individualism. Participate or don’t, but don’t tell us sitting on the sidelines makes you a better person. Don’t tell us how serious you are, how rational, how moral, by your choosing “none of the above.”
Truth is, there’s no such thing as not voting.
Inaction is action, like it or not.
In 2000, novelist David Foster Wallace covered the Republican primary for Rolling Stone. He wrote that not voting is just what political parties want, because not voting means less interference from the governed. The parties are “keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day.
“You either vote by voting,” Wallace continued, “or vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some diehard’s vote.”
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—G.O.P. Has Only Itself to Blame:
The Republican Party is trapped between a rock and huckster.
Now that all of their other presidential candidates have dropped out of the race, Donald Trump is the last demagogue standing. He is their presumptive nominee. Their party belongs to him. It’s a YUUGE … disaster.
Now the few remaining serious folks in that party have to make a decision: support this man who, if current trends in polling hold, is likely to lose the general election by an overwhelming margin (and likely do even more damage to the party brand and hurt the chances of down-ballot candidates), or they can … wait, they don’t really have another option other than to sit out this cycle and pretend that their party hasn’t gone stark raving mad.
Max J. Rosenthal at Mother Jones writes—Former CIA Deputy Director: Trump Would Be a "Hard Brief"
The veteran CIA official who once provided intelligence briefings to presidential candidates—including Gov. George W. Bush in 2000 and Sen. John Kerry in 2004—says briefing Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, could be rather difficult.
"It's an extraordinary year and Trump doesn't fit any mold at all," John McLaughlin, the former deputy CIA director who served as acting head of the agency in 2004, tells Mother Jones. "I think he'd be a hard brief." [...]
The White House has ultimate say over what information goes into the briefings, and McLaughlin says President Barack Obama could even decline to offer briefings to the candidates. But he believes that would be unlikely. His hunch is that in the case of Trump, the White House would take extra steps to stress to Trump and his aides the sensitive nature of the information and the need to protect it. "But who knows?" McLaughlin adds. "We don't know who [Trump] is."
Chris Lehmann at In These Times writes—Even a Time Finance Columnist Is Now Questioning American Capitalism:
Casual browsers might mistake Rana Foroohar’s Makers and Takers for a Tea Party manifesto. The phrase is most famously identified with House Speaker Paul Ryan, who warned in 2010 that “takers”—i.e., people who receive more in federal benefits than they pay in taxes—were poised to become the majority of Americans, eclipsing the “makers”—the business owners and financiers who create hardy economic value.
But Foroohar, an economics columnist for Time and analyst for CNN, inverts Ryan’s callow sloganeering to devastating effect. Makers and Takers is a closely argued, richly reported anatomy of the sluggish, unequal and crisis-prone state of the U.S. economy under the dictates of financialization—the tax giveaways, financial-sector deregulation, securitized debt, etc., that are celebrated by figures such as Ryan.
Take, for example, the fanciful pretext for Ryan’s remarks: the well-worn lament that to even slightly increase regulations is to browbeat would-be job creators into a state of paralysis. In truth, Foroohar notes, “there isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest that lowering taxes on the rich makes them any more or less likely to invest or start businesses.”
The Editorial Board of The New York Times deplores—Louisiana’s Color-Coded Death Penalty:
The last time a white person in Louisiana was executed for a crime against a black person was in 1752, when a soldier named Pierre Antoine Dochenet was hanged after attempting to stab two enslaved black women to death with his bayonet.
This is just one of many grim facts in a new report describing the history of capital punishment in Louisiana and analyzing the outcome of every death sentence imposed in that state since 1976, when the Supreme Courtreversed its brief moratorium on executions and allowed them to resume.
Racism has always been at the heart of the American death penalty. But the report, in the current issue of The Journal of Race, Gender, and Poverty, drives home the extent to which capital punishment, supposedly reserved for the “worst of the worst,” is governed by skin color.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Make America empathetic again:
The first rule in elections is: Go for the votes you can get. By that measure, Hillary Clinton is right to try to put the old Obama coalition on steroids.
Donald Trump will expand the Democrats’ opportunities among nonwhite Americans and produce Clinton landslides among Latinos. These groups have good reason to fear and despise the man who has demeaned them.
And watch Republicans for Clinton become a major force in American politics, an alliance of mostly well-off, well-educated voters — plus women of all classes. The members of the party of Lincoln who support Clinton will see that against Trump she is the safe and even, by the non-ideological definition of the term, conservative choice.
But Clinton also has to challenge Trump for at least a share among angry and struggling white, working-class voters with real economic grievances. Their votes matter if she wants to keep Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania in the Democratic column.
Sarah Lahm at In These Times writes—If Education Reformers Are Concerned About a Teacher Shortage, Then Why Are They Attacking Teachers?
School districts in rural Minnesota are also struggling mightily to attract teachers, leading a grassroots advocacy group, called MREA, to make this online declaration: “Minnesota can no longer turn a blind eye to the severe teacher shortages and long-term teacher supply issues in the state. A lack of teachers is affecting academic opportunities and achievement in our schools.” MREA has worked alongside groups such as the statewide teachers union, Education Minnesota, to make expanding Minnesota’s teaching pool a high priority for the state’s 2016 legislative session.
But on April 13, a different set of priorities emerged, as Minnesota became the third state—after California and New York—to become ground zero in a billionaire-backed war against teacher tenure and “last in, first out” seniority-based layoff rules. In St. Paul, while legislators, teachers and union advocates wrestled with how to rapidly and equitably expand Minnesota’s teaching force, a lawsuit challenging the state’s teacher tenure and seniority-based layoff rules suddenly commanded a flurry of attention.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a handful of plaintiffs, with the support of local and national law firms, as well as national education reform groups Students for Education Reform and the Partnership for Educational Justice.
Heather Stewart at The Guardian writes—Offshore finance: more than $12tn siphoned out of emerging countries:
More than $12tn (£8tn) has been siphoned out of Russia, China and other emerging economies into the secretive world of offshore finance, new research has revealed, as David Cameron prepares to host world leaders for an anti-corruption summit. [...]
The analysis, carried out by Columbia University professor James S Henry for the Tax Justice Network, shows that by the end of 2014, $1.3tn of assets from Russia were sitting offshore. The figures, which came from compiling and cross-checking data from global institutions including the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, follow the Panama Papers revelations of global, systemic tax avoidance. [...]
Henry argued that when senior figures in authoritarian states such as China use tax havens to guard their money safely, they were effectively free-riding on the legal and financial systems of other countries. “All of these felons and kleptocrats are, in a way, essentially dependent on the rule of law when it comes to protecting their money,” he said.
He said it was not just exotic locations such as the Cayman Islands where money could effectively be hidden, but also some US states, such as Delaware, where it is possible for foreign investors to start up and run a company without making clear its ultimate ownership – something all UK firms will have to do from later this year.
Robert Mackey at The Intercept writes—Donald Trump’s Hairspray Woes Inspire Climate Denial Riff:
Donald Trump launched into a bizarre riff on Thursday night, denying climate science in remarks to West Virginia coal miners by comparing the regulation of their industry to the ban on something closer to his personal experience: aerosol hairspray.
After being presented with a miner’s helmet by the West Virginia Coal Association, an industry group that endorsed him, Trump briefly put it on to do a broad impression of a miner digging with a shovel. He then removed it and asked the crowd if the helmet had messed up his hair, which triggered a lengthy tangent on the good old days, before aerosols were phased out.
“My hair look okay?” Trump asked the crowd. “Got a little spray — give me a little spray.”
“You know, you’re not allowed to use hairspray anymore because if affects the ozone. You know that, right?” he said to laughter. “I said, ‘You mean to tell me’ — ’cause you know hairspray’s not like it used to be, it used to be real good,” he added, to more laughs. “Give me a mirror. But no, in the old days, you put the hairspray on, it was good. Today, you put the hairspray on, it’s good for 12 minutes, right?”
“I said, ‘Wait a minute — so if I take hairspray and if I spray it in my apartment, which is all sealed, you’re telling me that affects the ozone layer?'” “‘Yes.'” I say, no way, folks. No way!”