Is Donald Trump a Racist?

Written by Nicholas Kristof

HAS the party of Lincoln just nominated a racist to be president? We shouldn’t toss around such accusations lightly, so I’ve looked back over more than 40 years of Donald Trump’s career to see what the record says.

One early red flag arose in 1973, when President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department — not exactly the radicals of the day — sued Trump and his father, Fred Trump, for systematically discriminating against blacks in housing rentals.

I’ve waded through 1,021 pages of documents from that legal battle, and they are devastating. Donald Trump was then president of the family real estate firm, and the government amassed overwhelming evidence that the company had a policy of discriminating against blacks, including those serving in the military.

To prove the discrimination, blacks were repeatedly dispatched as testers to Trump apartment buildings to inquire about vacancies, and white testers were sent soon after. Repeatedly, the black person was told that nothing was available, while the white tester was shown apartments for immediate rental.

A former building superintendent working for the Trumps explained that he was told to code any application by a black person with the letter C, for colored, apparently so the office would know to reject it. A Trump rental agent said the Trumps wanted to rent only to “Jews and executives,” and discouraged renting to blacks.

Donald Trump furiously fought the civil rights suit in the courts and the media, but the Trumps eventually settled on terms that were widely regarded as a victory for the government. Three years later, the government sued the Trumps again, for continuing to discriminate.

In fairness, those suits date from long ago, and the discriminatory policies were probably put in place not by Donald Trump but by his father. Fred Trump appears to have been arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927; Woody Guthrie, who lived in a Trump property in the 1950s, lambasted Fred Trump in recently discovered papers for stirring racial hatred.

Yet even if Donald Trump inherited his firm’s discriminatory policies, he allied himself decisively in the 1970s housing battle against the civil rights movement.

Another revealing moment came in 1989, when New York City was convulsed by the “Central Park jogger” case, a rape and beating of a young white woman. Five black and Latino teenagers were arrested.

Trump stepped in, denounced Mayor Ed Koch’s call for peace and bought full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty. The five teenagers spent years in prison before being exonerated. In retrospect, they suffered a modern version of a lynching, and Trump played a part in whipping up the crowds.

As Trump moved into casinos, discrimination followed. In the 1980s, according to a former Trump casino worker, Kip Brown, who was quoted by The New Yorker: “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor. … They put us all in the back.”

In 1991, a book by John O’Donnell, who had been president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted Trump as criticizing a black accountant and saying: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” O’Donnell wrote that for months afterward, Trump pressed him to fire the black accountant, until the man resigned of his own accord.

Trump eventually denied making those comments. But in 1997 in a Playboy interview, he conceded “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”

The recent record may be more familiar: Trump’s suggestions that President Obama was born in Kenya; his insinuations that Obama was admitted to Ivy League schools only because of affirmative action; his denunciations of Mexican immigrants as, “in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists”; his calls for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States; his dismissal of an American-born judge of Mexican ancestry as a Mexican who cannot fairly hear his case; his reluctance to distance himself from the Ku Klux Klan in a television interview; his retweet of a graphic suggesting that 81 percent of white murder victims are killed by blacks (the actual figure is about 15 percent); and so on.

Trump has also retweeted messages from white supremacists or Nazi sympathizers, including two from an account called @WhiteGenocideTM with a photo of the American Nazi Party’s founder.

Trump repeatedly and vehemently denies any racism, and he has deleted some offensive tweets. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi racist website that has endorsed Trump, sees that as going “full-wink-wink-wink.”

(Update: After this column was published, the Trump campaign emailed me the following statement: “Donald Trump has a lifetime record of inclusion and has publicly rebuked groups who seek to discriminate against others on numerous occasions. To suggest otherwise is a complete fabrication of the truth.”)

My view is that “racist” can be a loaded word, a conversation stopper more than a clarifier, and that we should be careful not to use it simply as an epithet. Moreover, Muslims and Latinos can be of any race, so some of those statements technically reflect not so much racism as bigotry. It’s also true that with any single statement, it is possible that Trump misspoke or was misconstrued.

And yet.

Here we have a man who for more than four decades has been repeatedly associated with racial discrimination or bigoted comments about minorities, some of them made on television for all to see. While any one episode may be ambiguous, what emerges over more than four decades is a narrative arc, a consistent pattern — and I don’t see what else to call it but racism.

Denmark Ranks as Happiest Country; Burundi, Not So Much

By SEWELL CHAN
Source :The New York Times 

LONDON — Denmark has reclaimed its place as the world’s happiest country, while Burundi ranks as the least happy nation, according to the fourth World Happiness Report, released on Wednesday.

The report found that inequality was strongly associated with unhappiness — a stark finding for rich countries like the United States, where rising disparities in income, wealth, health and well-being have fueled political discontent.

Denmark topped the list in the first report, in 2012, and again in 2013, but it was displaced by Switzerland last year. In this year’s ranking, Denmark was back at No. 1, followed by Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia and Sweden. Most are fairly homogeneous nations with strong social safety nets.

At the bottom of the list of more than 150 countries was Burundi, where a violent political crisis broke out last year. Burundi was preceded by Syria, Togo, Afghanistan, Benin, Rwanda, Guinea, Liberia, Tanzania and Madagascar. All of those nations are poor, and many have been destabilized by war, disease or both.

Of the world’s most populous nations, China came in at No. 83, India at No. 118, the United States at No. 13, Indonesia at No. 79, Brazil at No. 17, Pakistan at No. 92, Nigeria at No. 103, Bangladesh at No. 110, Russia at No. 56, Japan at No. 53 and Mexico at No. 21. The United States rose two spots, from No. 15 in 2015.

From 2005 to 2015, Greece saw the largest drop in happiness of any country, a reflection of the economic crisis that began there in 2007.

The happiness ranking was based on individual responses to a global poll conducted by Gallup. The poll included a question, known as the Cantril Ladder: “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

The scholars found that three-quarters of the variation across countries could be explained by six variables: gross domestic product per capita (the rawest measure of a nation’s wealth); healthy years of life expectancy; social support (as measured by having someone to count on in times of trouble); trust (as measured by perceived absence of corruption in government and business); perceived freedom to make life choices; and generosity (as measured by donations).

The report was prepared by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, an international panel of social scientists that includes economists, psychologists and public health experts convened by the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.

Though the findings do not represent the formal views of the United Nations, the network is closely tied to the Sustainable Development Goals, which the organization adopted in September, aiming, among other things, to end poverty and hunger by 2030, while saving the planet from the most destructive effects of climate change.

The field of happiness research has grown in recent years, but there is significant disagreement about how to measure happiness. Some scholars find people’s subjective assessments of their well-being to be unreliable, and they prefer objective indicators like economic and health data. The scholars behind the World Happiness Report said they tried to take both types of data into account.

In a chapter of the report on the distribution of happiness around the world, three economists — John F. Helliwell, of the University of British Columbia; Haifang Huang of the University of Alberta; and Shun Wang of the Korea Development Institute — argued against a widely held view that changes in people’s assessments of their lives are largely transitory. Under this view, people have a baseline level of contentment and rapidly adapt to changing circumstances.

The three economists noted research showing that people’s evaluations of their lives “differ significantly and systematically among countries”; that within countries, subgroups differ widely in their levels of happiness; that unemployment and major disabilities have lasting influences on well-being; and that the happiness of migrants approximates that of their new country, instead of their country of origin.

The three economists noted that crises can prompt vastly different responses based on the underlying social fabric. In Greece, where the economy began to plummet in 2007, setting off a crisis in the eurozone that has resulted in three financial bailouts, widespread corruption and mistrust were associated with the diminishing sense of happiness over the past decade.

In contrast, trust and “social capital” are so high in Japan that scholars found, to their surprise, that happiness actually increased in Fukushima, which was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, because an outpouring of generosity and cooperation contributed to the community’s resilience and rebuilding.

“A crisis imposed on a weak institutional structure can actually further damage the quality of the supporting social fabric if the crisis triggers blame and strife rather than cooperation and repair,” the economists wrote. “On the other hand, economic crises and natural disasters can, if the underlying institutions are of sufficient quality, lead to improvements rather than damage to the social fabric.”

The report, which was released in Rome, included a chapter analyzing Pope Francis’ influential encyclical last year, called “Laudato Si’,” or “Praise Be to You,” which included a cutting assessment of a world in which continuous technological progress was accompanied by environmental degradation, growing anxieties about the future and persistent injustice and violence.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, a Columbia University economist who edited the report with Dr. Helliwell and Richard Layard of the London School of Economics, praised Pope Francis’ admonition against hedonism and consumerism.

He also forcefully rejected the notion that happiness and freedom — especially when narrowly defined as economic liberty — are interchangeable.

“The libertarian argument that economic freedom should be championed above all other values decisively fails the happiness test: There is no evidence that economic freedom per se is a major direct contributor of human well-being above and beyond what it might contribute towards per-capita income and employment,” Dr. Sachs wrote. “Individual freedom matters for happiness, but among many objectives and values, not to the exclusion of those other considerations.”

The End of American Idealism

Charles M. Blow
Source: The New York Times

Sometimes it’s hard to shake the uneasy feeling that we are witnessing the dissolution of an idea that was once America.

The country is still a military superpower and an economic and innovation powerhouse, but so many of our institutions are proving to be either fundamentally flawed or deeply broken.

This thought kept creeping into my mind as I watched Thursday’s Republican presidential debate in Detroit. It seemed to me the zenith of a carnival of absurdity, as the candidates descended into what appeared to be a penis measuring contest.

I kept thinking with dread, “One of these men might actually be the next president” — either the demagogue from New York, the political arsonist from Texas or the empty suit from Florida. (I see no path for the governor from Ohio.)

In another political season, liberals might greet such a prospect with glee. But this is not that season.

On the Democratic side, the leading candidate is a hawkish political shape shifter, too cozy with big money, whose use of a private email server has led to an F.B.I. investigation, and who most Americans don’t trust.

(Around two-thirds of Americans don’t trust either party’s front-runner.)

Her lone opponent is a self-described democratic socialist who seeks to cram sweeping generational changes — hinged on massive systemic disruptions and significant tax hikes — into a presidential term. And he says that he will be able to do this with the help of a political revolution, one that has yet to materialize at the polls.

One of these people will be the next president of the United States.

And this is the country of which they will take the helm:

We are a country stuck in perpetual warfare that is now confronting the threat of the Islamic State terrorist group. The Republican candidates have proposed the most outlandish approaches to that threat, including everything from war crimes such as torture and killing terror suspects’ families to carpet bombing in the Middle East until we can see whether “sand can glow in the dark.”

Our government is broken. We have a legislative branch that increasingly sees its role as resistance rather than action. There is an opening on the Supreme Court that Republican leaders in the Senate, in a breathtaking and unprecedented move, are saying they won’t let this duly elected president fill.

The appointment may fall to the next president.

But that same Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech, swinging the door wide open to allow to the ultrawealthy to have nearly unlimited influence on the electoral process.

No wonder a 2014 study found that America has effectively transformed into an oligarchy instead of a democracy.

And yet, that is an idea that most Americans are pathologically incapable of processing. We suffer from a blithe glacialism, occasionally cursing the winds that carry our demise, but mostly hoping against hope and pretending that evidence of things seen and felt is either faulty or fleeting. It is not.

We have millions of undocumented immigrants in this country, but comprehensive immigration reform remains a thing we bicker about but never move on.

Our infrastructure is in shambles, but in a country where the bridges are crumbling, Republican candidates are obsessed about building a border wall. The city of Flint was poisoned as officials sought to pinch pennies.

Global warming continues unabated, most likely intensifying the severity of extreme weather — from droughts to hurricanes to blizzards — and yet last month the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Obama administration’s rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

Our educational system, from pre-K to college, serves the wealthy relatively well, but leaves far too many without access, underprepared or drowning in debt.

We are plagued by gun violence and mass shootings and yet no one is moving forward on meaningful solutions.

America’s middle class is shrinking. According to a December Pew Research Center report: “Fully 49 percent of U.S. aggregate income went to upper-income households in 2014, up from 29 percent in 1970. The share accruing to middle-income households was 43 percent in 2014, down substantially from 62 percent in 1970.^”

Our criminal justice system has made a mockery of the concept of equal justice with its racially skewed pattern of mass incarceration. Not only is the United States “the world’s leader in incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in the nation’s prisons or jails — a 500 percent increase over the past thirty years,” according to the Sentencing Project, but the group also points out:

“More than 60 percent of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities. For black males in their thirties, 1 in every 10 is in prison or jail on any given day. These trends have been intensified by the disproportionate impact of the ‘war on drugs,’ in which two-thirds of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color.”

The list of woe is a mile long.

There is palpable discontent in this country among those who feel left out and left behind in the bounty of America’s prosperity.

How long can the center hold? How long can the illusion be sustained? How long before we start to call this the post-American idealism era?

For the New Superrich, Life Is Much More Than a Beach

By ROBERT FRANK
Source: The New York Times

 Peter and Maria Hoey

Jean Pigozzi, the venture capitalist and art collector, was lounging by the pool at his villa in Cap d’Antibes early this month, enjoying a rare break from what he calls “the circuit.”

He attended the TED ideas conference in March in Vancouver, mingling with the likes of the tech investor Yuri Milner and Larry Page of Google at the “billionaires’ dinner.” Then he was off to the art auctions in New York and the Cannes Film Festival, where he threw a pool party attended by Woody Allen, Uma Thurman and the billionaire Paul Allen.

In the next few weeks, after the Art Basel fair, he will be off to the Wimbledon tennis tournament and “the Mediterranean milk run” — the summer megayacht procession leading from St.-Tropez to Portofino and Capri.

“We go all around the world to see some of the same people,” Mr. Pigozzi said. “It’s a circuit. There are a lot of parties, sure. But you’d be surprised at how much business gets done.”

The new rich have developed their own annual migration pattern. While the wealthy of the past traveled mainly for leisure and climate — the ocean breezes of New England in the summer and the sunny golf greens of Palm Beach in winter — today’s rich crisscross the globe almost monthly in search of access, entertainment and intellectual status. Traveling in flocks of private G5 and Citation jets, they have created a new social calendar of economic conferences, entertainment events, exclusive parties and art auctions. And in the separate nation of the rich, citizens no longer speak in terms of countries. They simply say, “We’ll see you at Art Basel.”

An analysis using data from NetJets, the private-jet company, and studies from Wealth-X, the wealth research firm, offers a look at the annual flight path of this elite traveling circus. It starts in January in St. Bart’s, with the New Year’s Eve party thrown by the oil billionaire Roman Abramovich on his 70-acre estate, with top celebrities and business and media titans in attendance, and performances by bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. After that, it’s on to the World Economic Forum in Davos, then the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, where this year politicians like Tony Blair and Wesley Clark, along with billionaire hedge fund and private equity chiefs like Ken Griffin and Leon Black, chatted about the global economy.

The art auctions in New York in May kick off the spring. Then it’s back to Europe for the Cannes International Film Festival, the Monaco Grand Prix, Art Basel and the Royal Ascot horse race in Britain. In the summer, the wealthy disperse to the Hamptons, Nantucket, the South of France and other resorts. A conga line of megayachts rolls through the Mediterranean from France to Italy, including David Geffen’s 453-foot Rising Sun and the vodka magnate Yuri Shefler’s 436-foot Serene.

In late August, the car-loving rich head to Pebble Beach for the Concours d’Elegance auto show and auctions, where last year a vintage Ferrari sold for $38 million. Then it’s back to New York for the Clinton Global Initiative for philanthropy mixed with hobnobbing, with swings back and forth across the Atlantic for the Frieze London art fair, the fall auctions in New York and Art Basel Miami Beach.

David Friedman, the president of Wealth-X, said that many of today’s rich were self-made entrepreneurs who prize business connections and making deals over spending time on the beach. Being able to say you chatted about self-driving cars over drinks in Sun Valley with Sergey Brin of Google conveys far more status than a winter tan from skiing in Gstaad.

Just as they want a return on their investment and philanthropy, rich people now want a return on their leisure time. “When they travel or socialize, there has to be some redeeming business value,” Mr. Friedman said. “They want a transaction, even from their social calendar.”

The calendar is a closed loop of access because the rich want to be seen, he said, but only by one another. With outrage over inequality driving more wealth underground, flashy spending and public hedonism have become less fashionable in very wealthy circles. Yet the competition for status among newly minted billionaires has never been stronger.

“They can be a schizophrenic group,” Mr. Friedman said. “They want to be private and they don’t want to be public targets. But they want a community. These selective events over the course of the year give them that community of like-minded people, without having to deal with the public.”

Granted, some of the superrich attend only one or two events on the calendar. And the circuit has offshoots depending on interests. Art collectors will be heavy on the art fairs and auctions but may attend little else. The equestrian crowd flocks to the Kentucky Derby in the spring and the Keeneland yearling auction in September; media titans go to the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley in July, while fashion devotees go to Fashion Week in New York and the couture shows in Paris. The foodies head to the Aspen Food & Wine Classic in June and to Italy in white-truffle season.

As Asia creates vast new wealth, events like the Hong Kong wine auctions and Art Stage Singapore will become bigger offshoots of the circuit. Yet for now, many of the superrich from China and other emerging markets are joining their fellow elites at events in Europe and the United States.

Major entertainment and sporting events are crucial dates for the rich. NetJets says the Super Bowl was one of its biggest flight events in the last year; 250 of its jets descended on Phoenix for the game, and weeks later, 250 to 300 of them departed for the Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Ga. So many private jets arrived in Las Vegas last month for the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight that some were redirected to nearby airports.

NetJets’ other big events are the Cannes Film Festival, with over 200 flights, and Art Basel, with 200 to 250 flights. Each spring, more than 100 NetJets planes head to Warren Buffett’s annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meeting, known as the “Woodstock for Capitalists,” in Omaha. (NetJets is owned by Berkshire.)

“It’s the ‘birds of a feather’ phenomenon,” said Patrick Gallagher, head of sales for NetJets. “These events give them a sense of security and of belonging. It’s people of similar tastes and similar interests.”

 

In fact, so many rich people have been joining the circuit that Mr. Pigozzi said a new “supercircuit” is emerging, one that has V.I.P. events within the V.I.P. events. At the TED conference, the aptly named “billionaires’ dinner” held nearby has become the most sought-after ticket. And true media moguls now attend the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, a few weeks after the Cannes Film Festival.

“Lions is now the important one,” he said. “Cannes has become too mainstream.”

Correction: July 5, 2015 

 
The Inside Wealth column on June 21, about the changing calendar of events attended by the very wealthy, referred incorrectly to the activities of the venture capitalist and art collector Jean Pigozzi. Although he was in Davos, Switzerland, in January, at the time the World Economic Forum was held, he did not attend it.

Leak of Pope’s Encyclical on Climate Change Hints at Tensions in Vatican

By JIM YARDLEY and ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

Source: The New York Times

ROME — The unexpected leak of Pope Francis’ much-anticipated environmental encyclical has meant the return of something that not long ago was fairly common around the Vatican but had become often dormant during the two-plus years of Francis’ mostly charmed papacy: intrigue.

Who leaked it and why? Was this the work of frustrated conservatives in the Vatican, as some experts have speculated? Does it portend big fights at a pivotal October meeting in which church officials are expected to grapple with homosexuality and divorce? Or is it just a tempest in a teapot?

“Somebody inside the Vatican leaked the document with the obvious intention of embarrassing the pope,” said Robert Mickens, a longtime Vatican expert and editor of Global Pulse, an online Catholic magazine.

 The Vatican press office was tense on Tuesday. Hours after a draft of the encyclical was published Monday on the website of L’Espresso, an Italian magazine, the Vatican indefinitely revoked the credentials of Sandro Magister, the journalist who wrote a short introduction that accompanied the magazine’s publication of the draft. Vatican officials say the leaked draft is not the final version of the encyclical, which has been barred from release until Thursday.

Leaks are hardly uncommon in journalism — some would consider them sustenance — and Vatican journalism has been no exception. Most recently, Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy was undermined when his butler leaked documents, in an episode known as VatiLeaks, that exposed infighting and discord in the Vatican. The scandal is considered one of the reasons that Benedict resigned, leading to the March 2013 election of Francis.

With global interest in the Francis encyclical — titled “Laudato Si’,” or “Be Praised” — the Vatican had prepared a major media rollout, with a news conference on Thursday morning and the release of the final document. That has now lost some of its steam. Tempers flared inside the Vatican press office on Tuesday, both among staff members and among a handful of reporters, who criticized others for breaking what they saw as an inviolable promise not to publish before Thursday.

The immediate focus of attention was Mr. Magister, who writes a widely read blog about the Vatican on the L’Espresso website and is known as one of Francis’ toughest critics. Mr. Magister said he was simply following orders: He wrote a short introduction to the draft after his boss, Luigi Vicinanza, L’Espresso’s editor, got a copy and decided to go public.

“Sure,” Mr. Magister said in an interview, “I’m the one who got suspended. I violated a pledge not to break the embargo. So I didn’t object to the suspension.”

Mr. Vicinanza said he had written on Tuesday to the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, explaining that he, not Mr. Magister, was responsible for posting the draft. Mr. Vicinanza told the Vatican spokesman that he did not feel bound to respect the embargo because he had not received the text from the Vatican. He declined to say where he had gotten it.

“There’s no intrigue, just journalism,” Mr. Vicinanza said in a telephone interview.

Many journalists agreed that under similar circumstances, they, too, would have posted the draft. But several Vatican analysts on Tuesday also argued that it was no coincidence that the draft had found its way to Mr. Magister. He wrote a June 1 column that criticized the alleged “inspirers” of the encyclical as being advocates of abortion. He has characterized the Vatican news media as being soft on Francis, while also criticizing the pope on foreign policy and as being overly fixated on himself.

“The light is all for him, the pope,” Mr. Magister wrote in April 2014. “Not the institution, but the person.”

Giacomo Galeazzi, a Vatican expert who writes for La Stampa, a Turin newspaper, said the leak could have come from prelates in the Roman Curia, the governing body of the Vatican, which Francis is trying to reform. In an interview, Mr. Galeazzi argued that the pope’s enemies on the outside “want to weaken the encyclical’s message, while those inside want to weaken the figure of the pope.”

Mr. Galeazzi also noted that L’Espresso had published several critical articles of the encyclical in recent weeks, which he called “a pre-emptive strike to an encyclical that has already broken one record: It is the first to be attacked even before it has been published.”

Alberto Melloni, a liberal scholar and Vatican historian, said the leak reflected the continuing tension inside the Vatican, where some entrenched members of the Curia remain resistant to changes that Francis is trying to pursue. Leaking the draft was a way of demonstrating that the Vatican remains in some ways dysfunctional while also tainting Francis’ reformist credentials, Mr. Melloni said.

“This shows the daily fight he has to fight,” he said.

The big showdown is expected in October, when Francis will convene a major synod at Vatican City to discuss issues related to the theme of family. Much is under discussion, including the question of whether divorced Catholics should be allowed to receive communion. The synod is expected to be a hotly contested event, and many analysts saw the leaked encyclical as a piece of this larger struggle.

Marco Politi, a Vatican analyst and author of “Pope Francis Among the Wolves,” said tensions had been steadily rising in recent months, especially since Francis delivered a stern address in December, accusing members of the Roman Curia of careerism and hypocrisy. A few months later, Mr. Politi noted, documents were leaked showing the expenditures made by Cardinal George Pell, the man appointed by Francis to tighten control of the Vatican’s budgets.

“This was a sign of this inner battle over the policies of Pell to control all the budgets of the departments,” Mr. Politi said.

Despite it all, most analysts doubted that the leak would bring much, if any, damage to Francis. One senior Vatican official took it in stride, playing down conspiracy theories while pointing out that journalists just want scoops.

“It has happened before, and it will undoubtedly happen again,” the Vatican official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “It is not the best situation, but it is not the end of the world.”

Nor is Francis alone. In July 1968, Time magazine got a leaked copy of Pope Paul VI’s much-hyped encyclical on birth control, “Humanae Vitae.” According to the book “Keepers of the Keys,” by Wilton Wynn, a former Time bureau chief in Rome, an “unknown man” arrived at the Time office with a copy for sale. Mr. Wynn said his staff verified its authenticity and gave the man about $500, “which he gladly took and scampered away.”

Time then had a world exclusive: Paul VI had said no to birth control pills.

 Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome.

Why the reviled FIFA leader is stepping down (Video)

Source: Time
Sepp Blatter, who proclaimed to the world that he was “president of everybody” after winning a fifth term as head of FIFA on Friday, will soon be nobody’s president.

In a stunning turn, Blatter, who seemed to hold so firm to the stance that he, and he alone, could clean up the corrupt organization that he presided over, announced on Tuesday that he would step down as FIFA’s leader, a position he has held since 1998. An extraordinary FIFA congress will meet to elect a new president: the head of FIFA’s audit committee said the timing of the election is “likely to be between December and March.”

Was it pending legal trouble that helped bring down Blatter? He painted his resignation as a selfless act, an attempt to give FIFA a fresh start. But his troubles could just be starting. A New York Times report said that Blatter’s top lieutenant made a $10 million bank transaction that puts the bribery trail that much closer to Blatter himself. The New York Daily News reported that Aaron Davidson, one of the sports marketing executives arrested in the U.S. probe into FIFA’s business practices, is trying to cut a plea deal. Will he, and other indicted officials, be singing about Blatter? “Let me be clear,” Kelly Currie, acting U.S. attorney for the eastern district of New York, said last week. “This indictment is not the final chapter of our investigation.” The president’s defiant words on Friday — “Why would I step down? That would mean I recognize that I did wrong” — may yet come back to haunt him.

But Blatter is nothing if not tenacious. “I am a mountain goat that keeps going and going and going,” he once said. “I cannot be stopped, I just keep going.”
Joseph S. Blatter was born in Visp, a remote Swiss Alpine town, and was sportswriter, PR rep, and reportedly a wedding singer before he rose up the ranks at FIFA, where he has worked since 1975. Since he took over as FIFA president in 1998, corruption has tainted his reign. During his first presidential election, there were allegations that some votes were bought. One month before his 2011 re-election, Blatter pledged $1 million in FIFA money at an assembly for CONCACAF, the regional soccer governing body for North America, Central America and the Caribbean at the center of the current scandal.

Almost immediately after FIFA decided in December 2010 to award World Cups to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022, bribery allegations began surfacing. Last week, the Swiss government announced a criminal investigation specific to the bidding process for these events. The Qatar decision has also sparked a humanitarian crisis. Migrant workers have toiled in triple-digit heat building the stadiums and infrastructure needed for the tiny Gulf nation to host the world’s most popular sporting event. According to a 2014 report from International Trade Union Confederation, 1,200 migrant World Cup workers from India and Nepal have died.

Under Blatter, FIFA has operated with little real transparency. This is an organization that produced a $27 million propaganda film in which Blatter was the hero.

His few supporters will point to his achievements; he did disperse money to many poor countries, where amenities like soccer facilities provided real benefits. The women’s World Cup, and women’s soccer overall, grew in popularity, though Blatter was a clumsy steward. The self-proclaimed “godfather” of women’s soccer once suggested that women wear tighter outfits to attract more fans, and before this year’s women’s World Cup, which kicks off June 6, top players sued FIFA for gender discrimination.
 
FIFA’s revenues ballooned under Blatter: FIFA currently has $1.5 billion in cash reserves. But how much was the president himself responsible for this business success, given the entrenched popularity of the World Cup, and an environment where media outlets are paying record rights fees across many sports to broadcast big events?

Whoever FIFA elects as its next president will have to grapple with Qatar – can a World Cup conceivably be staged there, given the human toll? — and cleaning up the disgraced organization. Tough times are ahead. But Blatter’s resignation offers hope, for many soccer fans around the globe, that the game’s organizing body can start to reform itself.

“Have a nice day,” a FIFA flack said at the end of the stunning press conference that ended the Blatter era. For soccer fans around the globe, indeed, it was.
 

Can Capitalists Save Capitalism?

by Thomas B. Edsall

Source:  The New York Times

Key Democrats have reached agreement on a set of policies known as “inclusive capitalism”: a forceful market-oriented economic agenda intended to counter inequality, restrain the accrual of vast wealth at the top and provide the working and middle classes with improved economic opportunities.

From the White House to Congress to liberal think tanks, recent Democratic proposals would substantially alter the rules of the marketplace. These include major revisions of the tax code, legislation to pressure corporations to increase pay to match productivity growth and an expansion of refundable tax credits to include low-income workers as well as households making as much as $80,000 a year.

According to a report by the former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and Ed Balls, a top British Labor Party politician, unless there is serious government intervention, inequality and a lack of financial resources among those in the bottom half of the income distribution will result in “insufficient aggregate demand – too little spending by consumers and businesses to keep gross domestic product at its capacity.” Developed nations “need new social and political institutions to make 21st century capitalism work for the many and not the few,” Summers and Balls wrote.

“Inclusive capitalism,” according to its advocates, seeks “to make our economic system more equitable, more sustainable and more inclusive.” It is an international movement that has now made its way into Democratic Party circles.

Mark Carney, the Canadian governor of the Bank of England, articulated a fundamental premise of inclusive capitalism in a speech delivered in Britain last May: “Just as any revolution eats its children,” Carney said, “unchecked market fundamentalism can devour the social capital essential for the long-term dynamism of capitalism itself.” Among the attendees at the conference in London in May were such Democratic and liberal luminaries as Bill Clinton; Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google; and Summers, who served President Obama as a top economic adviser.

Two of the earliest advocates of inclusive capitalism were the late C.K. Prahalad, professor of business at the University of Michigan, and Stuart L. Hart, professor emeritus of strategic management at Cornell. In a widely cited 2002 article, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” Prahalad and Hart argued that powerful corporations could — must — improve the conditions of the world’s poor by promoting commercial activity, employment opportunities, access to credit, and wealth creation among those at the bottom of income distribution – a group they refer to as the fourth tier, the world’s poorest four billion people.

Prahalad’s core thesis was that the poor could be the

engine of the next round of global trade and prosperity. If we stop thinking of the poor as victims or as a burden and start recognizing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up.

The concept of inclusive capitalism has expanded over the past 13 years to apply to those at the bottom and middle of the ladder in developed nations, including the United States. The fundamental “inclusive capitalism” argument is that business enterprises lose profit-making opportunities when consumers have little money to spend. Inadequate purchasing power among the many threatens corporations and poses a direct danger to the top 1 percent, and, indeed, to capitalism itself.

As testimony to the power of the concept of “inclusive capitalism,” President Obama in his State of the Union address called for the enactment of tax policies designed to provide a larger share of market-driven economic growth to the working and middle classes. In a May 7, 2014, speech in Dublin, “Global Lessons for Inclusive Growth,” Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, outlined central elements of the White House agenda. Administration policies, Furman argued, would result in “higher median incomes, lower poverty rates, and broader, more inclusive growth.”

Representative Chris Van Hollen, ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, outlined additional inclusive capitalism policies in “An Action Plan to Grow the Paychecks of All, Not Just the Wealth of a Few.”

The Summers-Balls report – “The Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity” – is the most comprehensive summary. This report, which uses the phrase “inclusive capitalism” more than a dozen times, was published by the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank founded by John Podesta – Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff who in February will join Hillary Clinton’s exploratory presidential campaign.

Those pressing the Democratic Party to take more populist stands contend that the lack of a persuasive Democratic economic program contributed to, or drove, devastating losses in the 2014 elections in states as diverse as North Carolina, Maryland, Iowa and Colorado. According to an Oct. 13, 2014, Gallup pre-election survey, voters believed Republicans were better equipped to handle the economy than Democrats by 50 percent to 39 percent.

If policies grounded in “inclusive capitalism” become central to the party platform, it will mark the party’s strongest commitment to the economic interests of working- and middle-class Americans since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The new agenda stands apart from Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which was focused primarily on the “Other America” of the very poor.

The most damaging contemporary American trend that the proposals seek to counter is the sharply declining share of national income flowing to labor, and the parallel increase in the share flowing to owners of capital. This trend, which accelerated sharply in 2000, is shown in Figure 1, a graphic produced by the White House.

Photo

The share of total income going to labor. The gray bars indicate recessions. Credit whitehouse.gov, from a speech by Jason Furman

“We need to share the wealth,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, chairman of the Senate Democratic Policy and Communications Committee and a leading proponent of the party’s focus on economics.

 

Schumer, in an interview, voiced strong enthusiasm for the Summers report. “It could bring together the left and center and even parts of the right,” Schumer suggested.

In his State of the Union address, Obama put it this way: “Let’s close loopholes so we stop rewarding companies that keep profits abroad, and reward those that invest in America.”

His plan calls for the imposition of new taxes on the wealthy and on major financial institutions, totaling $320 billion over 10 years. The money would be used to finance tax cuts and credits for low-to-moderate-income men and women, and to make attendance at community colleges tuition-free.

Not only would Obama raise capital gains tax rates from 23.8 to 28 percent for couples making more than $500,000 in taxable income, but he would eliminate a provision in tax law that allows the very rich to avoid taxation on much of the wealth passed on to their children and he would end a current exemption from taxation on the increase in the value of stocks, bonds and other assets when passed on through inheritance.

This exemption, technically called the “stepped up basis,” is crucial to the unrestricted intergenerational transfer of wealth, a practice that many liberals, and even some conservatives, contend conflicts with equality of opportunity. The Obama plan additionally calls for a .07 percent fee on financial institutions with more than $50 billion in assets that would produce $110 billion in revenue over 10 years.

Van Hollen, in turn, would raise revenues by imposing a transaction tax on stock trades. He would use the money to finance a $1,000 tax credit for workers making less than $100,000 annually, a $20,000 deduction for two-earner families, an annual $250 payment to those who put at least $500 into an approved retirement pension plan, and to substantially increase child care tax credits.

Van Hollen would also bar large corporations from deducting C.E.O. and other corporate compensation over $1 million unless employees got pay raises reflecting increases in worker productivity and the cost of living.

The Summers-Balls report includes many of the proposals outlined by Obama and Van Hollen. Balls warned on his blog that “unfettered markets and trickle-down economics are leading to increasing levels of inequality, stagnating wages and a hollowing out of decent, middle income jobs.”

Their report addresses four major economic developments broadly undermining wages and working conditions:

First, that “increasing global economic integration has also meant increased competition for many workers who produce tradable goods and services.”

Second, that “advances in robotics and artificial intelligence have put intermediate-skill jobs at risk in what economists call a hollowing out of the labor market.”

Third, that “Major corporations have opted to use subcontracting to perform basic functions, and many workers are now classified as independent contractors, eroding basic labor law protections.”

And fourth, “corporations have come to function much less effectively as providers of large-scale opportunity. Increasingly, their dominant focus has been on maximization of share prices and the compensation of their top employees.”

In addition, Summers and Balls argue that competition in the banking sector has broken down and “will need interventions to support the reasonable functioning of the free market.”

What do these points actually signify in practice? In a section titled “U.S. Policy Response,” Summers and Balls call for making parent companies responsible for the working conditions of employees of subcontractors; adopting government policies favoring employee stock ownership so that workers benefit from the growing share of national income flowing to capital as opposed to wages; and imposing tough and costly sanctions on employers who use illegal tactics to fight unionization.

Not stopping there, Summers and Balls call for a substantial boost in the $24,000 pay ceiling under which employees must get time and a half for overtime work beyond 40 hours a week; increased infrastructure spending of $100 billion a year, or $1 trillion over 10 years; and strengthened provisions in trade agreements guaranteeing collective bargaining rights and basic environmental protections to reduce the movement of American companies to countries with the lowest labor standards.

Among their other proposed policy initiatives are creation of an income tax credit for those with moderate pay levels. It would start at $23,260 for joint filers with children, just where the current earned-income tax credit phases out. At $85,000, the credit would diminish, reaching zero at $95,000. They would also change the mortgage interest and property tax deductions into tax credits. Deductions inherently provide larger benefits to those in higher tax brackets. Credits provide equal benefits to all who qualify.

Republican leaders in Congress have already stiff-armed these proposals.

In response to Obama’s plan to tax the wealthy to boost breaks for the working class, Michael Steed, spokesman for the speaker of the House, John A. Boehner, said in a statement, “More Washington tax hikes and spending is the same old top-down approach we’ve come to expect from President Obama that hasn’t worked.”

“The president needs to stop listening to his liberal allies who want to raise taxes at all costs and start working with Congress to fix our broken tax code,” Senator Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement,

Taken together, the Obama, Van Hollen, and Summers interpretations of “inclusive capitalism” are a victory for the left of the Democratic Party. This is especially the case for the Economic Policy Institute, which has been conducting a lonely fight for stronger legislative and regulatory initiatives to counter stagnating wages.

Josh Bivens, the research director at E.P.I., said in an email that the proposals did indeed “look like a shift in the Democratic Party on economic policy.” He said his hope was that “the next two years becomes a competition about who is willing to be the most aggressive in trying to boost low/middle-class incomes.”

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, called the Obama plan “a pretty big deal. Raising the capital gains tax rate and ending the stepped-up basis at death are changes that almost exclusively hit the wealthy, and they amount to a fair bit of money.”

  

While none of the proposals, or their advocates, acknowledge this explicitly, one of the objectives of the evolving Democratic economic agenda is to get back support among whites without college degrees – the polling shorthand version of what is sometimes still called the white working class.

In 2014, these voters, who made up 36 percent of the electorate, cast their ballots for Republican House candidates by a 30-point margin (64-34 percent). This was nearly double the 16-point Republican margin among white college graduates, 57-41.

Inclusive capitalism has its critics on the left, nicely summed up by the Guardian columnist Nafeez Ahmed. He argued last May that the inclusive capitalism movement represented “less a meaningful shift of direction than a barely transparent effort to rehabilitate a parasitical economic system on the brink of facing a global uprising.”

Andrew Grove, founder of Intel, put the push toward “inclusive capitalism” in a more positive light. “Our generation has seen the decisive victory of free-market principles over planned economies,” he told the Economist in 2012. “So we stick with this belief largely oblivious to emerging evidence that while free markets beat planned economies, there may be room for a modification that is even better.”

While the new agenda has no chance of passage in the Republican-controlled Congress, Democrats plan to use the tenets of inclusive capitalism in the 2016 elections. One Democratic goal in putting specific policies forward is to use them as wedge issues to force Republicans to choose between their affluent backers and their supporters in the white working class. This will be no easy task because a decisive majority of whites without college degrees has been voting against Democratic candidates for two decades, making it very difficult for the party to break what has been a Republican hammerlock since 1994.