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News

Trump weakens ties between the US and Africa

Among the billboards that greet passengers arriving at Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo airport is an advertisement for the Bank of China, which is among that country’s largest state-owned financial institutions.

“Bridging China-Africa cooperation with tailor-made financial solutions,” the sign reads.

The message reminded me of a discussion about Donald Trump with my seatmate, a man from Namibia (or Nambia, as Trump called it) in his fifties, on a flight to Johannesburg from New York, a day after the president, during a meeting at the White House with lawmakers, reportedly disparaged immigrants from Africa and Haiti.

While Trump insults Africa, China reaches out.

Trump debases the presidency, we agreed, “and he doesn’t do anything for economic growth,” added my seatmate, who, as it happens, manages the port at Walvis Bay, one of the busiest ports in Africa.

The tonnage at the port ebbs and flows with trade. If you run a port, the more trade, the better.

I asked my seatmate how in his experience, the U.S. in Africa compares with China in Africa. “The Chinese are out to make money,” he said. “They want to have the world’s biggest economy.”

If that’s China’s goal, Trump is providing an assist. Add to his latest remarks the ways – from withdrawing the Paris climate agreement and the Trans Pacific Partnership to embracing a travel ban that discriminates against Muslims – that Trump is isolating the U.S. at the same time as China ups its engagement with the world.

“To have insulted an entire continent in the most vile terms is manifestly harmful to our interests,” Reuben Brigety II, who was U.S. ambassador to the African Union from 2013 to 2015, told the Times.

The businessman who penned “The Art of the Deal” has yet to show he can be an opportunist when it comes to pursuing opportunities for anyone, including the U.S., besides himself. (Credit Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who in a 2016 interview, called Trump “a faker.”)

En route to Johannesburg, I read “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” the best-seller by Michael Wolff that claims to reveal the inside dope on the dysfunction that marked the administration’s first 100 days.

Commenting on what he terms the episodes of “ohmygodness” that emanate from Trump daily, “it is worth considering,” notes Wolff,” the possibility that this constant, daily often more than once-a-day pileup of events – each one canceling out the one before – is the true aberration and novelty at the heart of the Trump presidency.”

At the White House meeting, Trump reportedly used the word “sh*#hole” as an adjective to describe Haiti and some nations in Africa.

The comment generated a wave of revulsion and followed a year of Trump’s debasing the presidency with appeals to racists, a disregard of presidential norms against self-dealing, attacks on judges and a worldview that appears to be informed solely by cable news.

The word “sh*#hole” does not appear in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary. It’s profanity and slang, I suppose. Of course, racism does appear in the dictionary and, of the time of this writing, was the third most looked up word in the past 24 hours. (You can find “sh*#hole” in Urban Dictionary.)

In the wake of Trump’s comment, people the world over took to Facebook and Twitter to call him out by, among other things, noting their living in places such as “South Shi*#hole” or, to ask, as the writer Peter Godwin did, whether “Nambia is a shi*#hole.”

As the posts suggest, the Trump presidency demands vigilance against what Masha Gessen, writing in The New Yorker, calls “the ongoing degradation of the public sphere.”

The news, Gessen notes, is not that the president “is a foul-mouthed racist – we knew that… the news is that he insists on dragging the rest of us down with him.” (David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick of the Times have attempted to compile a definitive list of Trump’s racist comments, dating to his years in New York and continuing through his asserting that the nation’s first black president was not born in the U.S.).

We can choose not to be degraded – to show the self-respect that is beyond the president. As the spokeswoman for African Union Chairperson Moussa Faki, noted, “The United States of America is a big country and the United States of America goes beyond just one man or one statement.”

Categories
Movies

Postscript: Lincoln Plaza Cinemas

We stopped by the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas on Monday for a 4:55 p.m. showing of “Darkest Hour,” the film about Winston Churchill in May of 1940, when, as newly appointed prime minister, he rallied the nation to fight against Hitler’s Germany.

As fans of all things Churchill (and Gary Oldman, whose performance as the prime minister may earn him an Oscar), we wanted to see the film a second time. But mostly we wanted to delight for the last time in the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, which are slated to close on Jan. 28.

We commented recently on the greatness of the theater, which seems like a rarity nowadays: a movie theater for people who love movies.

The passing of the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas will follow by roughly a month the death of their founder, Dan Talbot, the film distributor and impresario who, together with his wife, Toby, opened the place in 1981.

Texting and talking tend to case as soon as the lights dim for the previews. That, plus terrific movies and a snack bar that features carrot cake, ricotta cheesecake, banana bread and coffee, and you can imagine why a moviegoer might start to miss the place.

Inside the theater, about a quarter full at that hour, we found a seat at far right, one row from the rear. An instrumental version of “Somewhere” from “West Side Story” played over the speakers. With the temperature outside on Broadway about 22, we appreciated the coffee as we awaited the previews.

Categories
Politics

Donald Trump did not campaign to be president

Michael Wolff’s book about the Trump White House corroborates something that reporting on the president has alluded to previously: He never contemplated that he might be elected.

For Trump, a businessman turned reality TV star, the campaign represented an exercise in brand building. The Times’ election tracking needle wasn’t the only indicator that Hillary Clinton would win the election. Until the end, Trump thought she would too.

“The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior or their fundamental worldview one whit; we don’t have to be anything but who and what we are, because of course we won’t win,” Wolff writes in “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”

For Trump, “losing was winning,” Wolff adds. “Trump would be the most famous man in the world – a martyr to crooked Hillary Clinton.”

The calculus also applied to members of Trump’s campaign team.

In Wolff’s telling, the campaign would vault Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to the status of global celebrities and ambassadors for the Trump brand. Steve Bannon “would become the de facto head of the Tea Party movement.”

Kellyanne Conway would be a cable news star. And Melania Trump could return “to inconspicuously lunching” and raising the couple’s son.

Anyone who has watched Trump before or after the election could reasonably wonder why he even wanted to be president.

“After little more than three weeks, Trump’s behavior is no more erratic than it used to be, but in the context of the Presidency it seems so,” Jeffrey Frank, writing in The New Yorker, noted last February, less than a month after Trump took the oath of office.

Frank ventured that nothing the presidency offered could top the reality that Trump had created for himself in New York. As Frank put it:

“Life in midtown Manhattan was good for a fellow like Trump, who was recognized everywhere and regarded even by his detractors more as a cartoon than a threat. He could enjoy the city’s pleasures, which included dining at San Pietro, a favorite restaurant… For someone like Trump, Washington cannot be the most exciting place to live, and won’t be unless he begins to thrive in the company of world leaders who don’t speak English, and philosophers like Paul D. Ryan, the Speaker of the House, who could probably go on for hours about, say, how a medical savings account offers tax relief for low-income workers who are about to lose their affordable health insurance. Then there are the briefings and hours of meetings and piles of memoranda, but having to read more than a page, or too many bullet points, is said to test the limits of Trump’s attention—and the camera demands the image of stern attention. That, at least, seems to be one of his core beliefs.

Wolff’s book does nothing so much as confirm that observation. Which leaves one to wonder whether instead of railing against Wolff, the president would not have been better off simply noting that Wolff gets most of the story right. And leave it that. At least that would jibe with reality.

The issue isn’t that Trump was a long shot. Underdogs win elections, too. Trump gamed the process to achieve an end other than the one he set out to achieve. By winning he failed miserably. That has to be a first in the history of the presidency.

Categories
Law Privacy

New York ruling that lets police follow cellphone locations without a warrant highlights significance of Supreme Court review in Carpenter case

New Yorkers have no constitutionally protected right to privacy in information about our whereabouts that can be deduced from the data emitted by our cellphones, an appeals court in Rochester has ruled in a case that underscores the significance of a ruling expected this spring from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sharhad Jiles was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison after being found guilty in the shooting death of Sheldon Hepburn during a 2011 robbery. At trial, prosecutors used records obtained from the company that provided Jiles’ cellphone service to place him in the location of the murder.

Jiles asked the judge to exclude the records, which revealed his location over a period of four days beginning on the data of the robbery; information that Jiles contended prosecutors needed a warrant to obtain.

Prosecutors had acquired the records, which track every time our cellphones register with the nearest tower, via a subpoena issued to the provider pursuant to the federal Stored Communications Act, which allows the government to obtain such data without a showing of probable cause of a crime. The trial judge sided with prosecutors and Jiles appealed.

On appeal, Jiles argued that so-called cell site location information is protected by the Fourth Amendment by two rulings of the Supreme Court: a 2012 decision that overturned the conviction of a Maryland man based on evidence obtained from a GPS device that police, acting without a warrant, affixed for 28 days to the underside of his automobile; and a 2014 ruling by the court that police may not, without a warrant, search the contents of a cellphone obtained from someone who has been arrested.

The New York court disagreed, citing a series of rulings by federal courts that suspects have no constitutionally protected privacy in records they voluntarily supply to a third party such as checks, deposit slips and other records filed with banks or telephone numbers they dial.

“We remain bound by the third-party doctrine when interpreting the Fourth Amendment [until] a majority of justices on the [Supreme] Court instructs us otherwise,” Justice Gerald Whalen wrote on behalf of the court in a Dec. 22 ruling.

The instruction should arrive this spring, when the Supreme Court is expected to rule in an appeal from Timothy Carpenter, who was convicted and sentenced to 116 years in prison for a series of robberies in Ohio and Michigan.

At trial, prosecutors introduced evidence of Carpenter’s location they gleaned from records obtained from his cellphone provider that revealed his movements over a period of 127 days.

Like Jiles, Carpenter contended that the government should have obtained a warrant for the records, but both the trial judge and the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in the appeal on Nov. 29. Nathan Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who argued on behalf of Carpenter, distinguished business records such as those filed with a bank from the location data collected by the towers that carry calls from our cellphones.

“The information in bank records can be quite sensitive, but what it cannot do is chart a minute-by-minute account of a person’s locations and movements and associations over a long period regardless of what the person is doing at any given moment,” Wessler said in response to a question by Justice Alito.

Such data gives the government “a categorically new power that is made possible by these perfect tracking devices that 95 percent of Americans carry in their pockets,” he said later in response to a question from Justice Kennedy.

Arguing for the government, Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben dismissed the distinction. By obtaining records that reveal a suspect’s historical location, the government “is doing the same thing” it did in the case of bank records, he told the justices. “It is asking a business to provide information about the business’s own transactions with a customer. And under the third-party doctrine, that does not implicate the Fourth Amendment rights of the customers,” Dreeben added.

As Amy Howe at Scotusblog noted, the challenge for the justices may be where to draw the line between information that is entitled to protection of the Fourth Amendment and that which the government can obtain with a subpoena.

“This is highly personal information,” Justice Breyer remarked, referring to location data that can be gleaned from cell towers.

Justice Sotomayor took note of the erosion on privacy that can accompany developments technology. “Right now, we’re only talking about the cell sites records, but as I understand it, a cell phone can be pinged in your bedroom, “she said. “It can be pinged at your doctor’s office. It can ping you in the most intimate details of your life. Presumably at some point even in a dressing room as you’re undressing. So I am not beyond the belief that someday a provider could turn on my cell phone and listen to my conversations.”

Justice Alito pushed back, challenging Wessler to distinguish cell site location data from bank records or telephone numbers called. Cellphone service contracts advise subscribers that the company can disclose location information to the government pursuant to a court order.

Wessler replied that the Stored Communications Act provides two ways the government can obtain records: either by a court order or a warrant. That, he argued, suggests that anyone looking at the law “would be quite reasonable and right to assume that the reason there’s a warrant prong is to deal with records like these in which there’s a strong privacy interest.”

Some experts say the march of technology means it’s time for the court to discard the third-party doctrine entirely. Writing recently in The Washington Post, Bruce Schneier, a technologist and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, noted that we store most of our data on computers that belong to other people.

“It’s our email, text messages, photos, Google docs, and more — all in the cloud,” Schneier wrote. “All this data will be collected and saved by third parties, sometimes for years. The result is a detailed dossier of your activities more complete than any private investigator — or police officer — could possibly collect by following you around.”

Police should be able to draw on the data to help solve crimes, Schneier said. But they first should be required to have probable cause and obtain a warrant.

“It’s long past time the Supreme Court recognized that… my emails and other personal data deserve the same protections, whether they’re on my laptop or on Google’s servers,” he noted.

Categories
Asides

What social media showed us in 2017

On May 26, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt took to the radio to talk with the American people about mobilizing for war. The address was the 14th “fireside chat” by the president, who during the Depression began the practice of using the airwaves to address Americans directly.

In “No Ordinary Time,” her history of the Roosevelt administration on the home front in World War II, Doris Kearns Goodwin notes that during such talks the public could imagine that they were sitting beside the president in his study.

Kearns Goodwin quotes Richard Strout, a journalist who worked for The New Republic during those years. “You felt he was talking to you,” Strout recalled about FDR. “Not to 50 million others but to you personally.”

The idea of talking directly to Americans (and the world) found its footing anew in 2017 thanks to social media. Twitter alone reaches more than three times as many people each day as FDR reached via the radio.

Just over a year ago, Leslie Stahl of CBS News asked then President-elect Donald Trump whether he planned, after he became president, to keep up the use of Twitter that he had wielded during the campaign.

“I’m going to do very restrained, if I use it at all,” Trump replied. “I find it tremendous. It’s a modern form of communication… It’s where it’s at… I really believe that, the fact that I have such power in terms of numbers with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera.”

As we now know, Trump has not held back. In 2017, he used Twitter to speak to supporters. But he also used it to endorse a hate group, antagonize allies, threaten nuclear war, bully civil servants, and sow discord at home and abroad.

Of course, social media works two ways. When Trump appeared to disinvite the NBA champion Golden State Warriors from the White House, LeBron James, who reaches nearly as many people on Twitter as the president, rebuked him.

As Christopher Clarey noted on Friday in the Times, social media also gives athletes the means to amplify their messages – an opportunity for activism that many athletes have seized this year. Clarey notes:

What is evident is that the internet’s capacity to make the distant seem personal is not going away. Whether they are asked political questions or not, athletes, like other celebrities, will continue to be able to deliver their messages — be they solipsistic or deeply civic — directly and immediately to the public, no gatekeepers required.

Experts may debate whether a president actually can launch a nuclear strike at the touch of a button. But this year has showed that a president can risk apocalypse at the touch of a smartphone.

If anything, 2017 underscored that we are less likely to experience the moment at a remove. The year also highlighted, as the reaction to the tweet by James – which was liked by seven times as many people as the tweet by Trump that provoked it – the collective intelligence that modern media make possible.

Abraham Lincoln died a dozen years before Thomas Edison invented the first device that could record and playback sound. We infer what the 16th president sounded like by piecing together accounts of those who heard him speak.

Now, thanks to Twitter, we know what the president just watched on cable news.

“They can’t handcuff him,” Maggie Haberman, who covers Trump for the Times, told CNN recently. “They can’t break his fingers to keep him from tweeting. They do tell him: ‘Please don’t do this.’ He does these things anyways.”

Of course, the technology does not release the messenger from responsibility for his message.

As it happens, one of the protests that resonated the loudest this year was also the quietest.

It began a year earlier, when Colin Kaepernick, then the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, sat during the national anthem, a day after tweeting a message that compared the American and Confederate flags.

At least one reporter captured the portent of the moment. “At a time when NFL players are criticized for not speaking out on social issues, Kaepernick has provided a very significant and conspicuous gesture,” wrote Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk. “As the team noted, it’s his right to do so. But given that Kaepernick opted to make a stand by sitting during the traditional pregame honoring of the country and its flag — which is so tightly woven into the DNA of the NFL — there surely will be a reaction.”

Categories
News Politics

GOP Congress passes tax bill

Congress on Wednesday passed an overhaul of the U.S. tax code that supporters and opponents claim will benefit Americans. But they disagree on which ones.

Republicans say the measure, the biggest rewrite of the tax law in more than 30 years, will boost paychecks for middle-class households. Democrats contend the bill represents payback by Republicans to the party’s wealthiest donors.

Among other changes, the legislation will cut the rate on corporate taxes to 21 percent from 35 percent, lower the top rate paid by the highest earners to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, nearly double the dollar amount of the so-called standard deduction ($6,350 for single taxpayers in 2017), and expand both the tax credit for child care and the deduction for medical expenses.

The measure lowers the tax bill for owners of so-called pass-through businesses via a deduction of 20 percent.  (Pass-through entities constitute roughly 95 percent of U.S. businesses and sweep in everything from sole proprietors to law firms and hedge funds.)

The bill would limit, to $10,000, deductions for state and local taxes, curb deductions that homebuyers can take for the interest on mortgages, and reduce taxes on inheritances.

All but 12 Republicans voted for the measure, which Democrats opposed unanimously.

Here are a few of the reactions to the bill, which President Trump is expected to sign on Jan. 3.

President Trump: “The typical family of four earning $75,000 will see an income tax cut of more than $2,000.  They’re going to have $2,000, and that’s, in my opinion, going to be less than the average.  You’re going to have a lot more than that.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: “If we can’t sell this to the American people, we ought to go into another line of work.”

Chuck Schumer, Senate Democratic leader: “There are only two places where America is popping champagne over the #GOPTaxScam: The @WhiteHouse & the corporate boardrooms, including Trump Tower.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan: “Tax rates are going down and paychecks are going up.”

Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas: “We will be cleaning up this mess and the blunders in this bill all of next year.”

Keith Hall, director of the Congressional Budget Office: “[The legislation] would reduce revenues by about $1,649 billion and decrease outlays by about $194 billion over the period from 2018 to 2027, leading to an increase in the deficit of $1,455 billion over the next 10 years.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, conservative economist: “Faster productivity growth will translate into more compensation — wages and benefits — for workers.”

Kimberly Clausing, liberal economist: “These tax cuts are unlikely to spur large increases in wages; careful cross-country evidence fails to find benefits to wages from corporate tax cuts.”

Stephen Myrow, a former Treasury official under President George W. Bush and now a policy adviser based in Washington: “Whether or not people feel it does something for them, it enables Republicans to reclaim the governing narrative they lost after failing to repeal Obamacare. People like winners.”

TJ Helmstetter, communications director of Americans For Tax Fairness: “This is not tax reform, it’s a money grab by the ultra-wealthy, including the multimillionaires in Congress and Trump’s own cabinet, who will benefit.”

Chad Moutray, chief economist, National Association of Manufacturers: “Our members are very happy about the tax bill as it’s written. You wouldn’t see that level of optimism if they didn’t think this was something that’s going to benefit them.”

Alec Phillips and Blake Taylor, analysts at Goldman Sachs: “We note that the effect in 2020 and beyond looks minimal and could actually be slightly negative.”

Dennis Mullenburg, CEO, Boeing: “The [tax bill] is the single-most important thing we can do to drive innovation, support quality jobs and accelerate capital investment in our country.”

Janet Yellen, chairwoman of the Federal Reserve: “It’s not a gigantic increase in growth.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization: “The bottom line is that while tax cuts can help accelerate economic growth in some circumstances, they will not generate anywhere close to enough growth to fully offset the revenue losses they create.”

Vice Money:“Republicans argue that these measures will be good for economic growth, which slowed markedly after the Great Recession. Maybe. But they will also likely shrink the American middle class even further in the years to come, as American inequality hits levels once considered, well, Latin American.”

Categories
News

Cyril Ramaphosa elected to lead South Africa’s ANC: reactions

South Africa’s ruling party elected Cyril Ramaphosa as its new leader on Monday, setting the stage for the passing of the country’s presidency from the embattled Jacob Zuma.

Ramaphosa, a lawyer, businessman and former colleague of Nelson Mandela who campaigned on a platform to root out corruption, unify the party and shore up South Africa’s economy, edged Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the president’s former wife, by fewer than 200 votes.

The rand surged against the dollar in response to the victory, as investors voiced relief at rejection of the populism espoused by Dlamini-Zuma and the prospect for reform following years of corruption that have scrambled South Africa’s prospects and led ratings agencies to lower their assessments of the country’s creditworthiness.

Still, the scale of South Africa’s challenges – including an economy that is growing about 1% annually and one in three workers unemployed – will confront Ramaphosa, who as head of the ANC is likely to become South Africa’s next president. He’ll also have to fend off threats from within the party, where he will be surrounded in the leadership by supporters of Dlamini-Zuma.

Here’s a sampling of reaction across South Africa and around the world:

Eusebius McKaiser, South African journalist and political analyst: “The central problem Ramaphosa will face as he takes the helm of the ANC is that the party is so politically damaged that he might find himself becoming the first ANC leader to lose a general election since South Africa became a democracy in 1994.”

Win Thin, a currency strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman: Ramaphosa “will not have a magic wand that can make South Africa’s structural problems vanish overnight.”

William Gumede, executive chairman of the Democracy Works Foundation, “Ramaphosa has a better chance of renewing confidence, not only in the markets but also inside the A.N.C., where reformers may now feel they have a place.”

Fatima Hlongeni, a community worker in Soweto who grew up there with Ramaphosa: “I’m happy that we now have a president of the ANC from Soweto. We hope that he can help to bring development here.”

Steven Friedman, political scientist at the University of Johannesburg: “He’s not the kind of muscleman politician that will go in and clean up. He’s more of a conciliator and bridge mender. There are all these wild expectations now.”

Richard Calland, professor at the University of Cape Town and expert on the ANC: “The ANC will struggle to rebrand itself as a party of the progressive center … the paradox is that Dlamini-Zuma lost but her faction won.”

Ben Payton, head of Africa Research at Verisk Maplecroft, a risk advisory firm in the U.K.: “It stretches credibility to imagine that Ramaphosa could win the ANC leadership without striking deals with key power brokers who seek to maintain a patronage-based political system.”

Julius Malema, leader of the EFF, one of South Africa’s two main opposition parties, and a former member of the ANC: “Nothing has really changed‚ the core of the corrupt premier league [referring to the party’s provincial leaders] is at the center of the organization.”

Zwelethu Jolobe, political scientist, University of Cape Town: “What we have seen here‚ however‚ is that there are mixed slates. Both camps [Ramaphosa and Dlamini-Zuma] have people in the top six.”

Oscar Mabuyane, ANC chairperson, Eastern Cape province: “This will collapse factionalism in how we elect leaders. We think we got a collective leadership that will take us to 2019 (general elections).”

Adam Habib, vice chancellor of the University of Witwatersrand: “It is a split leadership team but maybe that is for the better. For those who worry about Ramaphosa being paralyzed‚ remember that he has both Mantashe [elected ANC national chairperson] and Mashatile [elected ANC treasurer general]‚ both of whom are politically astute. He has political support and should use it.”

Categories
Film New York City

The Lincoln Plaza Cinemas near the end

We arrived at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas with anticipation recently to see “Darkest Hour,” a film about a newly appointed Winston Churchill confronting the threat of invasion from Nazi forces.

But we also looked forward to a film at the Lincoln Plaza, which you reach by descending a level from the box office on Broadway.

Tan carpet covers the lobby. The walls are painted lavender. One corner features a display case that holds memorabilia. There’s a concession stand that sells coffee and cake along with the candy and popcorn. An office across from the stand holds a desk and houses the management.

The six theaters themselves are throwbacks to an era before the horrors of stadium seating and moviegoers who text from their seats. The floors slope gently toward the screen. If the hallmarks of a great theater are the view and sound from the last row (where we like to sit) then the Lincoln Plaza may be the best in the city.

Happiness. At least until next month, when the Lincoln Plaza is slated to close, a victim of technology and rising rents across the city. The tale is one that recurs nowadays. “The Lincoln Plaza is the latest art house hit by a historic confluence of forces, including the streaming boom and New York gentrification,” noted Deadline, which broke the news.

Milstein Properties, which owns the building, said in a statement that “vital work” is needed to waterproof the plaza surrounding the building and that it expects “to reopen the space as a cinema that will maintain its cultural legacy far into the future.”

A spokesman for the company refused to say whether the theater would reopen with its operators, Daniel and Toby Talbot, at the helm.

If you like the Lincoln Plaza, thank the Talbots, who opened the six-screen theater in 1981. The Talbots, who are married for 68 years, have displayed independent films in the city since 1960. The theater reflects their stewardship.

“Our theater served as a springboard for a lot of foreign films,” Toby Talbot, already speaking in the past tense, told the Times, which noted that the theater introduced American audiences to such directors as Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Daniel Talbot has credited colleagues for the theater’s charms. In a 2004 speech to mark his receiving an award for lifetime achievement from the Independent Filmmaker Project, Talbot thanked the theater’s programmer and “Ewnetu Admassu, the house manager of the Lincoln Plaza… who runs the theatre as if it were his home. There is nobody like him.”

Categories
Tech

Transparency cannot replace net neutrality

Earlier this month, the chief financial officer of Verizon, one of the nation’s largest internet service providers, discussed the build-out of the company’s broadband fiber network to homes.

The network, which goes by the name FiOS, “continues to be a very good product,” Matt Ellis, the CFO, told investors at a conference sponsored by UBS. According to Ellis, consumers who opt out of cable but who subscribe to so-called over-the-top services such as Netflix “want the best broadband experience you can get, and FiOS is the best broadband experience in the marketplace.”

Therein lies the problem with the action led by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to repeal so-called net neutrality rules, which prevent ISPs from blocking, slowing or impeding content from providers they don’t own. The rules, to borrow Ellis’ phrase, help to assure the best broadband experience you can get regardless who owns the content you consume.

As the Republican majority at the FCC sees it, net neutrality constitutes “heavy-handed, utility-style regulation” that depresses investment and innovation.

Rather than order ISPs to keep their networks open – which, by the way, is the whole point of the internet’s decentralized design – the FCC will require ISPs “to disclose information about their practices to consumers, entrepreneurs, and the Commission, including any blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, or affiliated prioritization.”

According to Pai, the market – backed by laws governing competition and consumer protection – will achieve the ends of net neutrality without the need for rules to achieve it.

The evidence suggests otherwise. Most of us connect to the internet through our ISP. And for most of us, the market for ISPs tends to be a monopoly. In the neighborhood where I live, you can choose Spectrum as your ISP. That’s the choice.

Last February, New York’s attorney general accused Spectrum of misleading consumers with promises of speeds for wired internet that, as it happened, were as much as 70 percent slower than promised. The company allegedly charged customers as much as $109.99 per month for premium plans that could not achieve speeds promised by Spectrum in its slower plans.

Consumers knew they were being ripped off. (You can test the speed of your connection.) But acting alone, there was little they could do to compel Spectrum to honor its promise.

Though a class action may force the company to reimburse consumers for the wrong, a rule that required Spectrum to serve customers at speeds the company promised would have allowed them to receive the service they paid for.

In short, all the transparency in the world won’t help if you’re served by a monopoly.

The internet is the infrastructure of our modern age and, for that matter, the medium of our democracy. It resembles the electric grid more than it does the entertainment, sports and social networks that stream across it.

As most consumers know, ISPs can (and do) charge as much for connections as the market will bear. Net neutrality asks in return that they not privilege one stream of content over another.

Categories
News

Alabama election marks a win for clarity

On Tuesday, the Republican stronghold of Alabama elected Doug Jones, a Democrat, to the U.S. Senate following a campaign marked by allegations of sexual misconduct against Roy Moore, his GOP rival. The outcome signaled that Republicans, led by Donald Trump, backed a candidate that even many of their own supporters (to their credit), rejected, exit polls showed.

Earlier on Tuesday, about 4,482 miles from Birmingham, French President Emmanuel Macron, hosted a climate summit in Paris. He did not invite Trump – a sort of time-out for the U.S. president after the latter backtracked in June from the international climate accord.

Taken together, the results and the rebuke make the week seem like a moment for hopefulness and clarity. Here, in our opinion, are five of the heroes who emerged: 

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: The Democrat from New York called on President Trump to resign and for Congress to investigate multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault against him. The president, who denies the claims (and, falsely, that he never met the women who leveled them), took to Twitter to attack Gillibrand as a senator who used to come “begging for campaign contributions… and would do anything for them.”

The senator (among others) termed Trump’s reply “a sexist smear” that was intended to silence her. “You cannot silence me or the millions of women who have gotten off the sidelines to speak about the unfitness and shame you have brought to the Oval Office,” she said.

African-American voters in Alabama: Black voters made up 29% of the vote on Tuesday night, and they turned out overwhelmingly for Doug Jones, who won 49.9% of the vote. Ninety-eight percent of African-American women and 93% of men voted for Jones.

https://twitter.com/BurkeCNN/status/940798133579198464

That compares with 35% of white women and 27% of white men who voted for the Democrat. Turnout by black voters in the off-year contest topped that in the race for governor three years ago. “Following last month’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, when African-Americans helped vault Democrats to victories, the Alabama race is another sign that the party’s most loyal voters are fired up,” the Times reported.

The Washington Post: On Nov. 9, reporters Stephanie McCrummen, Beth Reinhard and Alice Crites detailed allegations by Leigh Corfman, who said that Moore initiated a sexual relationship with her in 1979, when she was 14 and he was 32. Over the weeks that ensued, the Post reported on allegations by a total of eight women who described misconduct or sexual assault by Moore over a period of years. Seven of the women were teenagers at the time of the alleged misconduct; Moore was in his 30s. In the election on Tuesday, two-thirds of women who have children under the age of 18 supported Doug Jones, Moore’s Democratic opponent, giving him a 34-point margin among that group, exits polls showed.

Senator Richard Shelby: In 1994, the Republican from Alabama betrayed Democrats when he switched parties. On Sunday, he made up for it by saying publicly he “couldn’t vote” for Moore and would write in “a distinguished Republican name” instead. Shelby added that the found allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore “credible” and “believable.” The break with his party by the senior senator from the state helped to mark Moore as unfit to hold public office (or any office) on the eve of an election that sent the first Democratic from Alabama to the Senate since 1992.

Emmanuel Macron: The French president hosted a meeting of dozens of world leaders to take steps to address the threat of climate change without the participation of the U.S. government.

The One Planet Summit highlighted the world’s determination to meet climate goals regardless of a decision in June by the Trump administration to abandon the Paris accord. On Tuesday, Macron, called the decision by Trump “very bad news” and warned against complacency in the effort to rein in global warming. The French leader also noted that eight U.S. states have launched an initiative on clean transport.