Beesquared

Category: News

  • Trump shows inability to get to yes

    President Trump likes to tout his skills as a negotiator. He has said the U.S. would make great deals on trade and military hardware during his presidency.

    But leaked transcripts of Trump’s calls with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull don’t exactly position the president as dealmaker-in-chief.

    In their landmark book “Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In,” Roger Fisher and William Ury outline six guidelines the authors, who founded the Harvard Negotiation Project, say can help both sides achieve more of what they want.

    The guidelines appear below in italics, followed by ways that Trump failed to use them in his back-and-forth with Pena Nieto about paying for a wall along the border or his exchange with Turnbull about whether the U.S. will honor a promise by President Obama to accept 1,250 refugees who are currently detained in Australia.

    Separate the people from the problem.

    Negotiators should try to imagine the situation from the viewpoint of their counterpart.

    Pena Nieto explains to Trump “the lack of margin” he has as president of Mexico to accept claims that his country will pay for the wall. But he also tells Trump that he understands the “small political margin” that Trump has “in terms of everything you said that you established throughout your campaign.

    Seven times, Pena Nieto uses the phrase “I understand” to acknowledge Trump’s position.

    Trump, by contrast, says “I understand” once, to tell Pena Nieto that he, Trump, understands Hispanic voters “and they understand me.”

    The closest Trump comes to acknowledging Pena Nieto’s position comes when Trump tells him, “we are both in a little bit of a political bind because I have to have Mexico pay for the wall – I have to.”

    Focus on interests, not positions.

    Draw out the interests that underlie your counterpart’s positions, with the goal of creating opportunities to explore tradeoffs.

    To Trump’s credit, he asks Turnbull why it’s so important that the White House honor Obama’s promise to take the refugees. But Trump tells his counterpart, incorrectly, that it’s 2,000 people. Rather than answer the question, Turnbull corrects Trump, telling him it’s “not 2,000” but 1,250.

    To which Trump replies that he’s also “heard like 5,000 as well,” without returning to the question he asked earlier. The exchange deteriorates from there.

    Learn to manage emotions.

    Be sure that you and your counterpart have opportunities to express any strong emotions that tie to your negotiation.

    In his call with Turnbull, Trump expresses frustration after Turnbull suggests Trump can say that the agreement by his predecessor to accept the refugees “is not a deal that you would have done, but you are going to stick with it.”

    Trump agrees he will say that, adding, “I think it is a horrible deal, a disgusting deal that I would have never made.”

    Trump continues:

    “As far as I am concerned that is enough Malcom [sic]. I have had it. I have been making these calls all day and this is the most unpleasant call all day. Putin was a pleasant call. This is ridiculous.”

    Turnbull asks Trump if he would like to discuss Syria and North Korea.

    “This is crazy,” Trump replies.

    Turnbull thanks Trump for agreeing to honor the pledge. “It is very important to us,” Turnbull tells him.

    Express appreciation.

    Work to understand your counterpart’s perspective and communicate understanding of it through words and actions.

    Trump does not convey to either of his counterparts that he understands their views. In contrast, Turnbull tells Trump that he understands Trump “is inclined to a different point of view” on the resettlement of refugees than Vice President Pence, who Turnbull said assured the Australians that the U.S. would honor the agreement to accept the refugees.

    Put a positive spin on your message.

    Communicate in a positive way, and speak only for yourself.

    Pena Nieto stays positive. The call between Trump and Turnbull fills with acrimony and never recovers.

    “Can you hear me out Mr. President” Turnbull asks Trump.

    “Yeah, go ahead,” Trump replies.

    Escape the cycle of action and reaction.

    Rather than dig in, explore interests, invent options for mutual gain, and search for independent standards.

    Besides trying to help Trump out of his bind by suggesting that Trump tell people he would not have agreed to resettle refugees if it were not for the promise by his predecessor. Turnbull adds that the exchange “requires, in return, for us to do a number of things for the United States.”

    When Trump relents, Turnbull offers the prospect of returning the gesture in the future. “You can count on me,” he tells Trump. “I will be there again and again.”

    “I hope so,” replies Trump, offering nothing.

  • The CEO of the world’s second-largest energy company says he will drive a hybrid

    The chief executive of the world’s second-largest energy company says his other car will soon be powered by a mix of gasoline and electricity in a sign that the world is going green.

    Ben Van Beurden, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, says he will switch this September to a plug-in Mercedes-Benz S550e hybrid from a diesel car, at least in part to reflect the reality of climate change and efforts such as the Paris climate agreement to combat it.

    “The whole move to electrify the economy, electrify mobility in places like northwest Europe, in the U.S., even in China, is a good thing,” Van Beurden told Bloomberg TV. “We need to be at a much higher degree of electric vehicle penetration — or hydrogen vehicles or gas vehicles — if we want to stay within the 2-degrees Celsius outcome.”

    Though symbolic, the announcement further cements a shift underway at Shell under Van Beurden’s leadership. In February 2016, the company acquired BG Group for $53 billion to create the world’s largest provider of liquefied natural gas. Two years earlier, Shell paid $5.4 billion for the LNG business of Repsol outside of North America.

    Shell has estimated that worldwide demand for oil could peak as soon as a decade from now.

    The International Energy Agency estimates that demand for oil will continue to grow worldwide until 2040, primarily because of a scarcity of substitutes that make economic sense in aviation, petrochemicals and trucking.

    Still, demand for oil from passenger cars is expected to decline over the next quarter century despite a doubling in the number of vehicles, “thanks mainly to improvements in efficiency, but also biofuels and rising ownership of electric cars,” the IEA said in November.

    Both the United Kingdom and France recently announced plans to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2040.

    Volvo in June became the first major automaker to say it will end reliance on internal-combustion engines. All the models Volvo brings to market starting in 2019 will either be hybrids or powered by batteries.

  • Trump pulls US out of the Paris climate agreement

    https://twitter.com/drvox/status/869961747473473536

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Theresa May’s letter triggering Brexit shows the UK is desperate for a deal on trade

    The United Kingdom is desperate to secure a trade pact with the European Union as negotiations begin on their unwinding.

    That’s one takeaway from a letter delivered on Tuesday by Prime Minister Theresa May to Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, that touches off what is likely to be two years of negotiations with the aim of untangling the U.K. from a pact that has governed its relations with the Continent for nearly half a century.

    The six-page missive emphasizes what May terms a “deep and special partnership” between Britain and the EU that encompasses cooperation on both the economy and security. Thus, she writes, it will be necessary for the sides to come to terms on a relationship that will govern after Brexit. As May writes:

    “This should be of greater scope and ambition than any such agreement before it so that it covers sectors crucial to our linked economies such as financial services. This will require detailed technical talks, but as the UK is an existing EU member, both sides have regulatory frameworks and standards that already match.”

    In short, she wants a substitute for the single market that members of the EU, including Britain, currently enjoy. A failure to negotiate such a pact, would leave the U.K. to trade under rules set by the World Trade Organization. And as the Economist explains, that may present challenges for all parties.

    “If Britain broke free from the EU, but kept the common external tariff in place, then a company moving parts between the EU and Britain could potentially face a tariff charge every time a border was crossed. Countries whose producers were hit by this development might make life difficult elsewhere for British negotiators.”

    May warns that failure to come to terms on trade also “would mean or cooperation in the fight against crime and terrorism would be weakened.” Though the pacts that govern security and defense tend to exist independently of the EU, both judicial cooperation and trade disputes are heard by the European Court of Justice. May has vowed that Britain will fall outside the jurisdiction of the ECJ after Brexit.

    There will be plenty to hammer out besides trade. That includes the status of EU citizens living in the U.K. and citizens of the U.K. who live in Europe. It also includes the parties’ ability to preserve an open land border between the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland, which belongs to the EU.

    Of course, the EU has a say as well. Talks on unwinding and trade “will not happen” concurrently, Tusk said on Thursday.

  • The Affordable Care Act survives 

  • South Africa marks Human Rights Day

    South Africa will pause Tuesday to mark the anniversary of a massacre that highlighted the horror of apartheid and led the republic to enshrine human rights.

    Human Rights Day, a public holiday, commemorates the events of March 21, 1960, when the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a political party that had formed a year earlier as a breakaway from the African National Congress (ANC), called on members to leave at home the passbooks the apartheid government used to control the movement of black, Indian and coloured people in urban areas, and offer themselves for arrest in an act of mass resistance.

    In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela, the ANC leader whom the government imprisoned for 27 years and who later became South Africa’s first democratically elected president, describes the demonstration in Sharpeville, a township located about 35 miles south of Johannesburg.

    “In the early afternoon, a crowd of several thousand surrounded the police station. The demonstrators were controlled and unarmed. The police force of seventy-five was greatly outnumbered and panicky. No one heard warning shots or an order to shoot, but suddenly, the police opened fire on the crowed and continued to shoot as the demonstrators turned and ran in fear. When the area had cleared, sixty-nine Africans lay dead, most of them shot in the back as they were fleeing. All told, more than seven hundred shorts had been fired into the crowd, wounding more than four hundred people, including dozens of women and children. It was a massacre, and the next day press photos displayed the savagery on front pages around the world.”

    The atrocity led the United Nations Security Council, for the first time, to urge the government of South Africa to promote racial equality, and began an exodus of capital from the country. The killings also  hardened the resolve of Mandela and other leaders, who went on to advocate for action aimed at disrupting the apartheid state.

    After Mandela became president, the country officially declared the day a public holiday and adopted a bill of rights that guarantees equality and human dignity.

    President Jacob Zuma is expected to travel on Tuesday to the Eastern Cape province, where he will honor Steve Biko, the anti-apartheid leader who died 40 years ago, at the age of 30, in a Pretoria prison after being tortured by white officers of the government’s security service.

    The PAC will host a march to commemorate the massacre at Sharpeville. “This is the most important day of our time as we commemorate the lives of [the] Sharpeville 69 and the fight against pass laws,” Tshego Mosala, the group’s spokesperson, told the Citizen newspaper.

  • The Trump border wall may be a barrier to public safety

    The wall that the Trump administration plans to build along the southern border may be a barrier to national security.

    To help pay for the wall, the administration is considering cuts to the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Washington Post reports.

    The Coast Guard’s annual budget may be cut 14%, to about $7.8 billion. The cut would cover teams that detect weapons of mass destruction, detain smugglers, board suspect vessels and escort ships deemed to present or be at risk.

    At TSA, the proposed budget would eliminate a program that sends agents and dogs to sweep airports, rail terminals and subway stations for explosives, as well as grants that local police departments use to pay for the cost of patrolling airports. Funds that FEMA uses to help state and local governments prepare for natural disasters and respond to emergencies would be slashed as well.

    The proposed cuts reflect a reprioritization of security spending. Overall, the administration is considering boosting by 6.4%, to $43.8 billion, the budget for the Department of Homeland Security.

    According to the Post, some $2.9 billion would go to funding the wall along the southern border. An additional $1.9 billon would pay for more immigration officers and border patrol agents, as well as beds for immigrants held in detention.

    In February, the DHS published a preliminary blueprint for the wall that sheds light on what construction entails. In addition to planning, design, construction and maintenance, funds would pay for “attendant lighting, technology (including sensors), as well as patrol and access roads.”

    As you might expect from this White House, the memos obligate the builders to consult with, among others, “nongovernmental entities having relevant experience” and to use “materials originated in the United States.”

  • ‘I want a president’

    ‘I want a president,’ Zoe Leonard (1992), The High Line

  • The Trump dossier differs from an indictment

    BuzzFeed itself made news Tuesday when it published a 35-page dossier detailing Donald Trump’s alleged relationship with Russia.

    Most news outlets, including the Times, The Washington Post and CNN, refrained from publishing the document, which as far as I know remains unverified. Dean Baquet, executive editor of the Times, said his organization would not publish “totally unsubstantiated” allegations.

    BuzzFeed said it published the dossier “so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.”

    But how can readers make up their minds about the truth of the charges, which include claims of meetings between Trump aides and Russian operatives, as well as sexual acts? As Erik Wemple wrote in The Washington Post, “Americans can only ‘make up their own minds’ if they build their own intelligence agencies, with a heavy concentration of operatives in Russia and Eastern Europe.”

    That intelligence agencies briefed both the president and president-elect about the allegations did not sway me either. I imagine the agencies brief the president about all sorts of unsubstantiated information – possible terrorist plots, for example – that I would be in no position to assess if I learned of them.

    At the same time, the existence of the dossier was known throughout official Washington. Mother Jones reported the information in October. Senator John McCain said he passed the dossier to the FBI.

    As Jack Shafer argued in Politico, “… when such a report is flung about by people in power, as this one was, and its allegations are beginning to inform governance, more damage is done to trust in government and confidence in journalism by withholding it from public scrutiny.”

    Ben Smith, BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief,  appeared Sunday on CNN to defend the decision to publish. “Our job is not to be gatekeepers,” he told host Brian Stelter. Smith compared the dossier to an indictment – a charge of a serious crime – which news outlets report on all the time, usually by prefacing the allegations with the word alleged. As Smith sees it:

    We are I think well within the tradition of American journalism, which is every time you use the world ‘alleged’ on your air, every time you see the word ‘alleged’ in print or on the web, that is saying we are repeating a claim we can’t verify. That is totally, within the standard particularly of covering law enforcement.

    The dossier reportedly originated as opposition research commissioned by one of Trump’s Republican rivals for the White House. It was later championed by a Democrat, though not necessarily the Hillary Clinton campaign.

    To bring criminal charges, prosecutors generally must have probable cause, which courts have construed as meaning they must have a reasonable basis for believing that a crime has been committed.

    According to the Justice Department’s charging guidelines, the requirement of probable cause merely begins the inquiry and does not alone automatically warrant prosecution.

    “On the other hand, failure to meet the minimal requirement of probable cause is an absolute bar to initiating a federal prosecution, and in some circumstances may preclude reference to other prosecuting authorities or recourse to non-criminal sanctions as well,” the guidelines instruct.

    Opposition researchers do not need to worry whether an allegation will hold up in court.

    That’s not to suggest that criminal charges necessarily have merit because prosecutors have assessed probable cause or that charges do not need to be substantiated. But they reflect a calculation by prosecutors, as the guidelines put it, “that the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain” a conviction.

    Of course, journalists are not prosecutors. And I share the instinct to want to provide readers with primary sources. But the dossier differs from an indictment.

  • Carrie Fisher