Elections

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares80 Views

      in Elections

      Stock Ownership Is What Really Divides Americans

      by

      In a pamphlet published in 1711, Jonathan Swift lamented the “folly” of those who “mistake the echo of a London coffeehouse for the voice of the kingdom.” Those informal salons were, he wrote, frequented by people whose wealth depended on their shares in the Bank of England or the East India Company or “some other stock.” If the responses to the Trump administration’s tariff policies have shown us anything, it is that, like most of the ills against which Swift railed, this unfortunate tendency to conflate stockholders with the nation remains very much with us.The greatest division in American life is not between so-called red and blue states, or between urban and rural citizens, but instead between those who own stock and those who do not. For those who do, economic security can be measured in portfolio statements; the rest — roughly 40 percent of Americans — must make do with such antiquated metrics as the cost of housing or even the price of eggs.This division is not merely economic; it is also ideological. Though many Americans own at least some stock, 10 percent of Americans own 93 percent of it. Yet the elite stock-owning class has convinced itself that what is good for the S&P 500 is good for America. Worse, many Americans who own stock through retirement plans or pension plans have been convinced to believe this, too, even though their interests tend not to align neatly with those of multimillionaires.The result is a kind of ideological capture in which any policy that does not serve the immediate interests of shareholders is dismissed as reckless, radical or economically illiterate. The common good, insofar as it is considered at all, must first be translated into the language of market returns. Can anything be good if it does not make the line go up? The question (we are told) answers itself.Like awed visitors to the oracle at Delphi, we consult the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 with solemn credulity, and their half-random fluctuations are taken as portents of divine favor, or else as intimations of the coming wrath of heaven’s gracious ones. All presidents — including Donald Trump — genuflect before this altar, and most of us implicitly regard any policy that displeases the great god Wall Street as a kind of sacrilege. We treat the stock market as the final arbiter of our collective well-being.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares85 Views

      in Elections

      How a Deal to Shape Golf’s Future Went Cold

      by

      Despite interventions by President Trump, talks to combine the PGA Tour and LIV Golf have come to a standstill.Just months ago, professional golf seemed to be on the brink of resolving a bitter conflict that had torn the sport apart. The PGA Tour and Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit, rival leagues that had been feuding over stars and audience share for several years, finally submitted a proposal for a deal to the Justice Department.Golf executives hoped President Trump would help move things along — and the president was confident he could.“I could probably get it done,” Trump said on the “Let’s Go!” podcast with Bill Belichick and Jim Gray in November. “I would say it would take me the better part of 15 minutes to get that deal done.”But it is taking a lot longer.As the Masters Tournament teed off this week at Augusta National, the negotiation has essentially come to a standstill, three people familiar with the talks said.Despite Trump’s personal interventions — in February, for example, he hosted Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the chairman of LIV and the governor of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, at the White House — the two sides appear at their greatest extremes since June 2023, when they stunned the sports world by announcing a thinly sketched deal that would bring an end to acrimonious litigation.“I don’t think it’s ever felt that close,” Rory McIlroy, the golfer from Northern Ireland, told reporters last week of those February meetings. “But it doesn’t feel like it’s any closer.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares80 Views

      in Elections

      The Digestible Politics of the Message Tee

      by

      Some elected officials and those in power are making use of a classic bit of fashion to deliver big ideas.With his approval rating dipping, New Yorkers seem to have lost trust in their mayor Eric Adams. But Mr. Adams is up front about where he’s putting his own trust right now: with God.On Tuesday, Mr. Adams, who announced that he would be running for re-election not as a Democrat but an independent, appeared at a press briefing wearing a T-shirt with the words “In God We Trust,” printed above an American flag.“This outfit is not campaigning, this outfit is my life,” Mr. Adams told reporters when asked about the white shirt, which looked to be about as premium as something purchased at a boardwalk souvenir stall.“I went through hell for 15 months and all I had was God,” said Mr. Adams, alluding to the federal corruption charges that were dropped against him this month.Mr. Adams is not the only political figure bringing the graphic T-shirt into formal political spaces.During President Trump’s prime-time address in early March a cluster of Democrats wore slogan T-shirts, providing a cotton-based clap-back to the president’s talking points. A few brandished the recognizable text: “Resist.” Florida representative Maxwell Frost, the first Gen-Z member of Congress wore a tee with the slogan “No Kings Live Here.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares75 Views

      in Elections

      A Lot About Trump Doesn’t Add Up

      by

      You have to give it to Donald Trump. The man is a marvel at multitasking.In one sensational swoop, President Trump was able to set the global economy reeling, shatter our alliances, shred our standing in the world, tank consumer confidence, scupper the Kennedy Center and tart up the Oval Office, turning it into Caesars Palace on the Potomac.And yet he still managed to find time to brag about winning his Jupiter golf club’s championship and sign an executive order relaxing restrictions on water pressure from shower heads — “I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” the president cooed. He also ordered an investigation of an election security official he had fired four years ago for having the temerity to acknowledge that the 2020 election was not stolen.“We’re living in a bizarro world where heroes are being targeted and scoundrels are in a position to target them,” David Axelrod told me.Trump is also consumed with terms of surrender for top law firms and Ivy League universities in his quest to get even with those he feels went after him unfairly or embraced wokeness too avidly.My Netflix algorithm searches for “revenge,” “lives ruined” and “mayhem.” But I don’t want that in my government.Trump is engaging the full power of the presidency to settle scores. The White House was not meant for petty tyrants on revenge tours. In the biggest job in the world, Trump seems like a very small man.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares80 Views

      in Elections

      Trump’s Tariff Pause Is Less Than Meets the Eye

      by

      Presidents who make big changes in government policy usually lay their plans with care. They game out what might happen next. They sweat the little things. Richard Nixon did not just decide one morning to fly to China. Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts were the better part of a decade in the making. The details of Barack Obama’s expansion of health insurance emerged from countless public debates.President Trump prefers to shoot before aiming. Declaring that he intends to reboot America’s relations with the rest of the world, he has imposed tariffs on imports with abandon, demonstrating a disregard for the details or the collateral damage. His careless conduct of the public’s business has roiled stock and bond markets, threatened to cause a recession and damaged America’s global standing. The president’s decision-making has been so erratic that at one point this week, the administration’s top trade official was interrupted in the middle of testimony before Congress because the president had just changed the policy the official was defending.The original version of Mr. Trump’s plan, which he paused on Wednesday, imposed tariffs on foreign nations at rates that bore no apparent connection to America’s national interests. The highest tariff rate, 50 percent, applied to Lesotho, a tiny and impoverished nation in southern Africa.The latest version isn’t much better. Mr. Trump is imposing a 10 percent tariff on imports from most nations, along with higher rates on imports from America’s three largest trading partners: Canada, Mexico and China. The average tax on imports will rise to the highest level in more than a century, raising the prices on many consumer goods. The 145 percent maximum rate on Chinese imports is intended to isolate that nation economically, but the simultaneous tariffs on everyone else will undermine that goal. And while the stated purpose of all the tariffs is to expand American manufacturing, putting them in place immediately doesn’t give companies time to build factories. It will cause pain without any benefit.We want to emphasize that Mr. Trump has a point about the pain caused by free trade. The decades in which the United States threw open its doors to imports from other countries left many Americans without jobs and decimated the nation’s industrial heartland. Washington’s naïveté about China’s rise, accomplished partly through its own trade barriers and theft of intellectual property, is particularly regrettable.A revival of American manufacturing is a worthy goal. It would not heal past wounds, but it could provide a basis for future generations of Americans to build lives and to rebuild communities that are more prosperous and more secure.The price of cheap goods from ChinaDecrease in manufacturing employment caused by increased trade with China, 2000-19. More

    • 150 Shares85 Views

      in Elections

      I’ve Listened to ‘The Great Gatsby’ 200 Times. Here’s What I Learned.

      by

      “The Great Gatsby” turned 100 this week. Probably, like me, you first read it in high school. My true engagement with the novel, though, began five years ago, when I was in my 50s and a writer and college teacher, and I started listening to a portion of the “Gatsby” audiobook every night.I started on March 17, 2020, which was the day the province of Ontario, where I live, declared a state of emergency because of Covid. My wife and I had listened to Jake Gyllenhaal’s rendition of “Gatsby” during a 2015 road trip, liked it and thought it would be a diverting bedtime story to get us through the lockdown, which we expected to last about three or four weeks. We set a sleep timer, pressed “play” and listened for 45 minutes, and the lockdown wound up lasting nearly two years.“Gatsby” for me has grown from a novel bedtime story to a nightly ritual to a kind of compulsion. It’s hard for us to imagine going to bed now without the compelling timbre of Mr. Gyllenhaal in our ears. In 2023 alone, I listened to “Gatsby,” which runs in its entirety for 289 minutes, just over 48 times. I broke that record in 2024 when I stopped setting the sleep timer and began listening to the entire book overnight, letting it unspool into my ears while I slept. “Gatsby” has now laid down roots in my brain — even into my dreams. In a way, that’s not just true of me but of the entire culture.The literary critic Maureen Corrigan once wrote that “Gatsby” contains some of “the most beautiful sentences ever written about America,” and it persists as a book that is nearly “perfect despite the fact that it goes against every expectation of what a Great American Novel should be.”Not only has it inspired at least five movies, an opera and a Broadway musical, “Gatsby” also has a habit of popping up in the strangest places: When the comedian Andy Kaufman wanted to subvert his stand-up by reading from a novel onstage, including on an episode of “Saturday Night Live,” he chose to read from “The Great Gatsby.” His prank inspired the New York-based experimental theater company Elevator Repair Service to create “Gatz” in 2004, a six-and-a-half-hour performance that involves actors reciting the entire book, word for word. And, yes, I’ve seen “Gatz.” Twice.There is a certain look I get when I tell people about my “Gatsby” ritual — call it “curious concern.” If I explain that during Covid I started listening to “Gatsby” as a comfort before bed — and have been listening to it almost every night since — I can hear how strange these words sound even as they trip out of my mouth. Who chooses as a ritual bedtime story a bittersweet novel that ends with a murder-suicide (preceded by a fatal car crash) in which no one finds love and the only character who ends up close to happy is a violent racist and a serial cheat? Maybe “Pride and Prejudice” would be a more acceptable obsession. It’s also a masterpiece and it has a happy ending. But only “Gatsby” can hold my attention. By now, I’m steeped in it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares101 Views

      in Elections

      Appeals Court Scales Back Freeze on Firing Consumer Bureau Employees

      by

      A federal appeals panel on Friday halted parts of a district court judge’s injunction blocking the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, allowing officials to move ahead with firing some agency employees.Russell T. Vought, the White House budget office director, was named the consumer bureau’s acting director in February and immediately began gutting the agency. He closed its headquarters and sought to terminate its lease, canceled contracts essential to the bureau’s operations, terminated hundreds of employees and sought to lay off nearly all of the rest.In a lawsuit brought by the bureau’s staff union and other parties, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington froze those actions last month with an injunction to stop what she described as the administration’s “hurried effort to dismantle and disable the agency entirely.” The Justice Department appealed her ruling.A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously rejected the government’s request to strike down Judge Jackson’s injunction, but it stayed parts of her ruling while the government’s appeal progresses. Specifically, the appeals court said the agency’s leaders can send a “reduction in force” notice — the process through which the government conducts layoffs — to employees they have determined are not necessary to carry out the agency’s “statutory duties.”When Congress created the consumer bureau in 2011, it assigned the watchdog agency dozens of tasks and ordered it to staff certain positions, including offices to aid student loan borrowers, military service members and older Americans. Those mandated obligations have been at the heart of the legal fight over the agency, because the bureau is required to fulfill those duties unless Congress acts.Mr. Vought’s team fired more than 200 probationary and fixed-term employees, only to reinstate most of them, with back pay, on Judge Jackson’s orders. The appeals court cleared the way for some to be fired again. Agency leaders may terminate employees after “an individualized assessment” of their necessity for carrying out the agency’s statutory tasks, the ruling said.But the court left much of Judge Jackson’s order intact, including her mandates that agency leaders shall not delete or destroy most of the bureau’s records and data, and that employees must be given access to either physical office space or the tools needed to work remotely. The consumer bureau’s Washington headquarters has remained shuttered and off limits to workers since Mr. Vought’s arrival.The appeals court expedited the government’s appeal and scheduled oral arguments for May 16. More

    • 163 Shares65 Views

      in Elections

      After L.A. Fires, Edison Wants to Bury Power Lines in Altadena and Malibu

      by

      Southern California Edison is echoing calls from homeowners to move spark-prone electrical equipment underground. Company officials estimated the cost at more than $650 million.Southern California Edison, the electric utility whose equipment has been the focus of investigations into the deadly Eaton fire in Los Angeles County in January, said on Friday that it planned to bury more than 150 miles of power lines in fire-prone areas near Altadena and Malibu, Calif.The project would require approval from state regulators, would take years to complete and would cover only a fraction of the utility’s vast service area. Still, underground lines have been among the top requests from fire-ravaged communities as Los Angeles looks to rebuild.In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, company officials estimated the cost of the project at more than $650 million. That amounts to about two-thirds of the nearly $1 billion that the utility estimated it would cost to rebuild the infrastructure that was damaged or destroyed in the wildfires that began on Jan. 7. Much of that cost is expected to be passed on to customers.But, officials said, the project will address a significant risk in two of Southern California’s most fire-prone areas. Officials said at least 90 miles of power lines would be buried in Malibu, and more than 60 miles in and around high-risk fire zones in Altadena, where the Eaton fire burned.“SCE will build back a resilient, reliable grid for our customers,” Steven Powell, the president and chief executive of the utility, said in a statement.Officials said on Friday that any distribution circuits not buried underground would be “hardened with covered conductor.” Company officials said in the letter that the investigation into the cause of the fire was still in progress, but they “acknowledged the possibility of SCE’s equipment being involved in the cause of the Eaton fire.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More