Beesquared

Blog

  • Our choice for New York City Council

    Tuesday is primary election day here in New York City. Like many New Yorkers, we’re studying the flyers that we’ve been handed at subway stops, perusing endorsements, and visiting candidates’ websites and social media.

    Here in District 9, five Democrats, one Republican and one member of the Reform Party are vying to unseat Bill Perkins, a Democrat who won a seat on the city council during a special election last February.

    Perkins, who previously served on the council from 1998 until 2005, is reminding voters that he stood with the Central Park Five when no one else would.  (Donald Trump called for their execution.)

    But in this, his second stint on council, the incumbent is showing signs of the office slipping away from him. His answers “even to softballs on major issues were embarrassingly blank,” the Daily News wrote after meeting with Perkins.

    The Daily News endorsed Marvin Holland, the political and legislative director for Transit Workers Union Local 100, who began his career cleaning subways. We like that Holland calls for ending so-called broken windows policing, which leads to injustices, and strengthening ties between police and the community.

    Cordell Cleare, who served for a decade as chief of staff to Perkins, is the lone woman in the race. We met her one morning outside the 3-train stop. She says she aims to preserve affordable housing, which matters in a district that is experiencing gentrification.

    We also like her commitment to justice. “If you choke a man to death who said, ‘I can’t breathe’ 11 times you should go to jail,” Cleare said recently at a debate, referring to the death of Eric Garner.

    Cleare earned the endorsement of the Amsterdam News, which says “it’s not possible” to cite Perkins’ successes without noting the contribution of Cleare.

    Tyson-Lord Gray, an environmental advocate and lawyer who has lived in the district for a decade, is running as well. We admire his work to introduce minority students to careers in conservation. Gray, whose grandfather was a farmer, holds a doctorate in environmental ethics from Vanderbilt.

    Marvin Spruill has lived in the district all his life. At a recent forum, he spoke “with a depth of feeling about policing” but otherwise “displayed little understanding of the issues,” noted City Limits. We like Spruill’s bio on Twitter, where Spruill says he’s “going all in, to go all out for our community!!” (emphasis in original)

    Julius Tajiddin, another Democrat who’s running, opposes bus lanes, which evidence shows speed traffic. That’s enough reason for us to oppose him for council. (We’d like to see portions of Manhattan car-free.)

    The Republican in the race is Jack Royster Jr., a pastor who found Christ after prison. We admire his being part of a prayer group whose morning walks aim to counter violence in the community.

    Pierre Gooding is running as a member of the Reform party. He’s a lawyer and former teacher, who says residents should not be forced to make the choice that his mother made when she moved her family out of Harlem to a community with better public schools.

    It’s a good group of candidates, but to us the choice is Cleare.

  • With his pardon of Arpaio, Trump embraces lawlessness

    Last month, Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, was convicted of criminal contempt for disregarding the order of a federal judge to stop detaining people merely because he suspected them of being in the U.S. without authorization.

    As sheriff, Arpaio directed his deputies to hold people despite their being neither charged nor suspected of crimes. By ignoring the court that had commanded him to halt such constitutional violations, Arpaio showed a “flagrant disregard” for the rule of law, Judge Susan Bolton of the U.S. District Court in Phoenix found.

    On Friday, President Trump pardoned Arpaio, a political ally who backed Trump’s presidential bid. In a statement announcing the pardon, the White House praised Arpaio for his work “of protecting the public from the scourges of crime and illegal immigration.”

    Presidents have broad power to pardon. But as some scholars have suggested, the courts have yet to rule on a case where a pardon excuses conduct by officials that violates the Fifth Amendment rights of others. Writing in the Times, Martin Redish, a professor of law at Northwestern, observes:

    If the president can immunize his agents in this manner, the courts will effectively lose any meaningful authority to protect constitutional rights against invasion by the executive branch. This is surely not the result contemplated by those who drafted and ratified the Fifth Amendment, and surely not the result dictated by precepts of constitutional democracy.

    Picking up the theme, Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel in the Obama administration, notes that a pardon of Arpaio in the middle of a legal proceeding – Arpaio had the right to appeal his conviction for contempt – breaks with “accepted norms for the grant of pardons.”

    Under Arpaio, the sheriff’s office engaged in “a pattern of unconstitutional policing,” the Justice Department found in 2008. Latino drivers were four to nine times more likely to be stopped than non-Latino drivers. Officers in the jail “discriminatorily” punished Latino inmates with limited proficiency in English who failed to understand commands in English.

    The officers called Latinos “wetbacks,” “Mexican bitches,” “fu#&ing Mexicans,” and “stupid Mexicans” when either talking among themselves or addressing Latino inmates. The sheriff’s department subjected people who criticized its practices to “retaliatory” arrests.

    That’s the lawlessness that landed Arpaio in court and that Trump, with his pardon, endorsed.

  • 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.

  • John McCain offers a lesson on legislating

    Like many people, I reacted with cynicism to the news Tuesday that John McCain would return to Washington to vote on whether a push by Republicans to dismantle the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could proceed.

    I presumed that McCain, who is being treated for an insidious form of brain cancer, would sound off about the need for his party to work with Democrats to shore up the health law only to vote in the end to repeal it anyway.

    After voting in favor of taking up the bill, McCain admonished his party to end their habit of “trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle.”

    Exactly what I expected from the Arizona Republican.

    The thought that McCain, who is being treated by doctors at the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix, might vote for a measure that would could leave 16 million people uninsured, offended me.

    But in the end, I was wrong. Around 1:30 a.m. Friday, after a full-court press that included a last-minute plea from the vice president, McCain voted against the repeal. He was joined by two other Republicans: Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska; and Susan Collins, of Maine. The White House threatened Murkowski with payback that included blocking nominees from Alaska to jobs at the Interior Department and halting expansion of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

    In exchange for his vote to keep the repeal going, McCain reportedly sought assurances from Speaker Paul Ryan that the House would use a measure passed by the Senate as the basis to negotiate between the chambers, rather than simply pass the Senate bill and send it to the president for signature. Whatever Ryan conveyed failed to assure McCain that a compromise measure would ensue.

    McCain said later he’d like to see the ACA replaced “with a solution that increases competition, lowers costs, and improves care for the American people,” but that the so-called skinny repeal that he killed did none of those things.

    He called on lawmakers to “return to the correct way of legislating and send the bill back to committee, hold hearings, receive input from both sides of aisle, heed the recommendations of nation’s governors, and produce a bill that finally delivers affordable health care for the American people.”

    Writing in The New Yorker, Mark Singer said McCain “chose to vote with his soul – in defiance of the bottomless soullessness that, when the ultimate moment arrived, he rejected.”

    John McCain long ago earned the status of war hero. But Friday on the floor of the Senate may have marked his finest moment.

  • Steven Spielberg conjures the Nixon era at Columbia

    The Nixon era came to Columbia University on Wednesday. Or more precisely, Steven Spielberg recreated 1971 on the steps of Low Library.

    The director brought with him cast and crew of “The Papers,” a movie about the Pentagon Papers that he is filming around the city this summer.

    The film tells the story of a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that rejected an effort by the Nixon administration to prevent the Times and Washington Post from publishing a secret history of the Vietnam War.

    We passed the set around 8:45 a.m., in time to hear Spielberg arranging his actors. They include Meryl Streep as Kay Graham, publisher of the Post, and Tom Hanks, who plays former editor Ben Bradlee.

    Dozens of protestors, actors all, massed on the steps of the library, where they held signs that called for press freedom. Spielberg was audible through the din though we could not discern his instructions. And then, “Action!” he called. He sounded like he meant it, which we trust he did.

    The publisher, the editor and their lawyers descended the stairs in a cluster, surrounded by a gaggle of reporters (again, actors), the way litigants do when they emerge from a courthouse. We can’t say whether the library served as stand-in for the Supreme Court.

    The columns that front the library’s facade are Ionic; the ones in front of the court are Corinthian. But Cass Gilbert, who designed the Supreme Court building, began his career at McKim, Mead and White, which designed the library.

    Around 1 p.m., the action broke. Protestors and reporters from 1971 emptied onto Broadway and turned left toward food trucks from 2017.

    The film is slated for release later this year. The timing seems impeccable. While the filmmakers filmed, the president of the United States tweeted. This time to announce that transgender people will no longer be allowed to serve in the military.

    The filming continued as we headed home later. Spielberg, it seemed, aimed to wring all he could from the light. The president offered only darkness.

  • Trump unloads via Twitter, aka Saturday

    On the day after Labor Day in 1973, Elizabeth Drew, a reporter for The New Yorker, told her editor she had “an intuition” that within a year the U.S. would change president and vice president.

    “At the time, this was a seemingly outlandish thought, but I go a lot on instinct and I just sensed it,” Drew writes in the introduction to “Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall," her book about that time.

    The Watergate scandal had not yet snared Nixon, but “there was already plenty of evidence that serious wrongdoing had taken place” in the administration, Drew writes.

    Saturday also felt like a day when the country might have a new president within a year.

    The morning began with Donald Trump unleashing a fusillade of tweets in which he said that presidents have “complete power” to pardon aides (and, perhaps, themselves) and complained about an “intelligence leak” that allowed the Washington Post to report that Attorney General Jeff Sessions discussed the presidential campaign with Russia’s ambassador last year.

    He also blasted the “fake news,” despite sitting for an hour-long interview on Wednesday with The New York Times. “Look, I think he loves the press,” said Maggie Haberman, one the reporters who interviewed Trump.

    The frenzy of social media followed a week in which Trump lashed out at Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation and hinted that White House aides are looking for ways to discredit prosecutors working for Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is leading the investigation.

    Mueller is reportedly examining a broad range of transactions involving Trump’s businesses.

    According to a Gallup poll published Friday, Trump held a job approval of 38.8% in the three months that ended June 19. That’s 23 points below the historical norm and the lowest such rating in a comparable period in the 72 years that Gallup has assessed job approval. (Trump’s rating in the first three months of his presidency also set a new low.)

    The discovery on Saturday afternoon of old tweets by Anthony Scaramucci show there was a time when the new White House communications director thought two of his boss' rivals might make better presidents than would Trump.

    “Odd guy, so smart, no judgment,” Scaramucci tweeted in February 2012 about Newt Gingrich after Trump said he would endorse the former House speaker for president.

    Two months earlier, Scaramucci praised Mitt Romney via Twitter for a decision to “stay out of the Trump spectacle.”

    Scaramucci deleted both tweets.

    About an hour later, he deleted a tweet from April 2012 in which he called Hillary Clinton “incredibly competent” and expressed hope she might run for president in 2016. Scaramucci also erased tweets of support for “strong gun control laws.”

    Scaramucci owned his decision to delete the tweets. “Past views evolved & shouldn’t be a distraction,” he wrote. “I serve [the president’s] agenda & that’s all that matters.”

    So much for principles.

    Still, in 118 characters, the communications director showed more openness than Trump has since announcing his run for the presidency.

  • Jamie Dimon can help fix the ‘stupid s*#t’ he says ails the US

    The chief executive of the nation’s biggest bank is sounding off about what he says is holding back the U.S. economy, but he may want to redirect his fire.

    Political gridlock, a tax code that sends investment overseas, a lack of investment in infrastructure and stupidity are all to blame, says Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

    “The United States of America has to start to focus on policy which is good for all Americans, and that is infrastructure, regulation, taxation, education,” Dimon told reporters on a conference call Friday to discuss the bank’s earnings. “Why you guys don’t write about it every day is completely beyond me. And, like, who cares about fixed-income trading in the last two weeks of June? I mean, seriously.”

    Putting aside Dimon’s pique – he seems to have become irritated by the temerity of a reporter who asked about revenue from bond trading, which fell 19 percent from a year earlier despite the bank’s record profitability in the quarter – the problem seems to lie less with the press (which writes all the time about policy) than it does with politicians.

    President Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to rebuild the nation’s crumbling highways and bridges and change the tax code, among other things. He and his party control all three branches of government.

    Which is why it’s strange that Trump began his punch list on infrastructure improvements with a push to privatize the nation’s system of directing air traffic.

    Speaker Paul Ryan is scrambling to find the votes, which, not surprisingly, fall a few dozen short of a majority, Politico reported on Saturday. Even GOP lawmakers say privatizing the air system gets them nothing in their districts.

    Lawmakers from rural states fear that privatization would lead to cutbacks in service to smaller airports. They thought that when the president said rebuilding infrastructure, he meant fixing crumbling roads, decaying bridges and other public works that create jobs.

    There may be a need to update air traffic control as well, but it mostly involves installing a system that guides planes via satellite.

    “I think fighting over this part of the infrastructure program [air traffic control] slows down progress we can make in getting a larger infrastructure plan in place,” Sen. Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas who serves on the committee that oversees the Federal Aviation Administration, told the Washington Examiner.

    Meanwhile, a rewrite of the tax code appears to be going nowhere.

    Dimon also cited education. The administration is discouraging states from including student performance in science as a priority, despite such coursework counting toward federal standards for student achievement, science teachers say.

    To be fair, that comes from science teachers. And Trump is continuing a stance adopted by the Obama administration. But the Obama administration didn’t also abandon a global agreement on climate.

    Dimon said it’s “an embarrassment being an American traveling around the world” and listening to the “stupid s*&t” Americans have to deal in connection with the country’s struggle to pass anything in Washington that might expand the economy greater than the one to two percent the US economy is growing at currently.

    Dimon may not be alone in his frustration. Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Trump’s performance, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.

    But compared with most Americans, Dimon’s job makes him uniquely able to do something about it. JPMorgan Chase spent nearly $3 million on lobbying last year. (Financial firms overall contributed more than $1.2 billion to congressional campaigns in the most recent elections, more than twice the amount given by any other sector.)

    He also serves on the White House Strategic and Policy Forum, a group of 17 top executives who advise the president on business.

    Sounding off to reporters generates headlines. But rallying business leaders to back an economic policy that benefits all Americans might be a better place to begin.

  • The US is yielding its leadership in the world

    On Saturday, the world’s economic powers, with the exception of the U.S., affirmed their commitment to the Paris climate agreement and pledged to work together to tackle challenges in areas ranging from trade and terrorism to migration.

    President Trump left the annual meeting of the G-20 without committing the U.S. to those shared goals. “We take note of the decision of the United States of America to withdraw from the Paris agreement,” the G-20 leaders wrote in a statement issued on Saturday. “The leaders of the other G-20 members state that the Paris agreement is irreversible.”

    America may still have its military might and economic might, but influence comes from leadership. “Most presidents understand this intuitively,” Derek Chollet and Julie Smith noted on Friday in Foreign Policy. Most presidents includes presidents of both parties.

    Of course, we are told the whole point of Trump is to deride the establishment, at home and abroad. By that measure, he has succeeded. But by any measure, we live in a many-sided world. And that’s not fake news.

  • Bravery and beauty this Fourth of July

    Last Sunday, feeling down about the debasement of the presidency and with July Fourth looming, I headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in search of the American Wing.

    Though I have visited the Met on at least six occasions over the past year, I tend to return each time to the modern and contemporary art, especially paintings by Picasso that I never tire of seeing. Thus, even with a map of the galleries, I asked twice for directions to the American Wing, a journey that took me across the building.

    Once there, I entered the galleries and passed a series of portraits from the 18th century that led me to “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” the painting by Emanuel Leutze that anchors the wing. The massive panorama, which was restored several years ago, practically shimmers.

    My gaze went to the armada of wooden boats filled with men, horses and guns that stretched a mile long like some 18th century D-Day, pushing through a river choked with ice on Christmas Day to dislodge Hessians camped on the other side. Being resolute under duress seems like something worth remembering nowadays.

    Nearby hangs “Camp Fire” by Winslow Homer. The painting depicts two men camped in the high peaks of the Adirondacks. The scene captures the woodsmen seemingly lost in thought in the comfort of their camp.

    http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11112

    I also liked gazing at “The Teton Range” by Thomas Moran. The jagged peaks of the mountains remind me of the natural beauty of the West and, for that matter, so much of America.

    http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11600