Attention to the Unseen

Politico reports: On May 28, 1986, newly commissioned 2nd Lt. Michael Pompeo stood at attention in Michie Stadium at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, first in his class. The career he was about to launch would take him from commanding a tank platoon in Germany to a seat in Congress, and ultimately to the right hand of President Donald Trump as secretary of State. Also on the field that day was classmate Mark Esper, who this July landed…

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The New York Times reports: In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing. What changed was the Trump administration’s tax cut — for which the company had lobbied hard. The public face of its lobbying effort, which included a tax proposal of its own, was FedEx’s founder and chief executive, Frederick Smith, who repeatedly took to the airwaves to champion the power of tax cuts. “If you make the…

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Robert Reich writes: On Thursday, the New York Times reported on a study showing that Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax (and presumably Bernie Sanders’ even more ambitious version) would reduce economic growth by nearly 0.2% a year, over the course of a decade. Under the headline “Warren Wealth Tax Could Slow the Economy, Early Analysis Finds”, the Times trumpeted the analysis, from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, as “the first attempt by an independent budget group to…

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Wilfred Codrington III writes: Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then. In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice…

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Rachel Donadio writes: From the olive grove just outside the high cement wall—one topped with spirals of razor wire, enclosing one of Europe’s most infamous holding pens for asylum seekers—you can see all the way clear to the Aegean Sea, gray-blue in the distance. It’s a straight shot across the water to Turkey, just six miles away at the narrowest stretch, an ancient Dardanelles trade route. Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos, is a symbolic place—a hinge between the…

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Renee DiResta, Michael McFaul and Alex Stamos write: In 1983, an anonymous letter from an author claiming to be an American scientist appeared in an Indian newspaper, asserting that the HIV virus raging across the world was a bioweapon released by the United States. Over the next several years, similar claims appeared in leftist and alternative newspapers around the world and ended up becoming widely believed among those predisposed to distrust the Reagan administration. As late as 2005, a study…

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Susan B Glasser writes: For a few hours on Friday, an unassuming career diplomat named Marie (Masha) Yovanovitch did something that I thought had become impossible in Donald Trump’s Washington: she managed to hold on to her amazement and outrage at the President’s amazing and outrageous actions. In this hyper-partisan, hyper-political time, she was neither. Nearly three years into this Presidency, that is no given. A state of weary cynicism has taken hold regarding Trump, among his supporters and also…

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Julia Davis writes: As Russia’s state media watch impeachment proceedings against U.S. President Donald J. Trump they’re loving what they see. They don’t think the man they brag about getting elected is in much danger. They listen in delight as Republicans parrot conspiracy theories first launched by Russians. And they gloat about the way Trump removed U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, because they blame her for promoting democratic “color revolutions” that weakened Moscow’s hold on the former Soviet empire….

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