Latest news with #Trump-driven
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Two Supreme Court Justices Invited an All-Out Assault on the Voting Rights Act. Now It's Here.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. On Wednesday, the Voting Rights Act suffered the second shot in a brutal new one-two punch, and some worry it could lead to a knockout blow at the Supreme Court. The Trump Department of Justice had already recently ended long-running bipartisan enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the part of the law that assures fair representation of minority voters in congressional, state, and local redistricting (among other things). Assistant attorney general for the civil rights division Harmeet Dhillon has signaled a pivot away from protecting minority voters and toward chasing phantom claims of voter fraud and pursuing other Trump-driven regressive election changes. These moves had already significantly hampered enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Now the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit has, for the second time, held that minority voters do not have the authority to sue states and localities directly themselves for Section 2 violations. It's a ruling that unless overturned will effectively end Voting Rights Act enforcement in the seven states comprising the 8th Circuit. What's worse, two Supreme Court justices already expressed agreement with the position of the 8th Circuit. If three more justices agree, Section 2 would be a dead letter throughout the United States, at least during Republican administrations. It's worth explaining the history of the Voting Rights Act's enforcement mechanisms in order to clarify why this latest ruling is not just a devastating blow to the law, but also an entirely ahistorical judicial power grab. When Congress passes laws protecting against discrimination, one question that arises is who may sue to enforce them. Sometimes a statute is clear that it may be enforced only by the federal government through the Department of Justice. Other statutes can be enforced by people who have been harmed under the law. When individuals or groups have the power to sue to enforce federal law, the term used is that the statute includes a 'private right of action.' Since 1982, when Congress passed the current version of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, courts have understood that private plaintiffs have the right to sue to enforce it. And such suits make up the vast majority of Section 2 suits that are brought. As the Guardian explained, 'Since 1982, there have been 466 Section 2 cases. Only 18 were brought by the Department of Justice.' When it passed the revision to the law more than 40 years ago, Congress surely understood it to mean that private plaintiffs could sue. In 2006, when Congress revamped the Voting Rights Act overall, it knew that the lion's share of Section 2 suits were brought by private plaintiffs and it did not change anything in Section 2 related to who could sue. So it was a surprise when the 8th Circuit in 2023 became the first court to hold that private plaintiffs did not have the right to sue to protect their voting rights. Other courts had reached contrary conclusions, but the 8th Circuit followed signals from two justices on the Supreme Court regularly hostile to voting rights claims—Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas—that Section 2 contains no private right of action. Plaintiffs did not try to take that 2023 case to the Supreme Court to try to get the ruling reversed, perhaps because voting rights lawyers had another theory for how plaintiffs could sue to enforce Section 2: by doing so through another federal statute, 42 U.S.C. section 1983, which allows people to sue for certain violations by state and local officials of civil rights. In a 2–1 ruling on Wednesday, the 8th Circuit shut down this other route to allowing private plaintiffs to sue to enforce Section 2. Like the 2023 version, the court's Wednesday ruling is ridiculous, rejecting Congress' long understanding that private plaintiffs can bring these suits. Chief Judge Steven Colloton, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in his dissent in the case, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Howe, that the 8th Circuit was wrong to be the only court to deprive plaintiffs of this effective tool: 'Since 1982, private plaintiffs have brought more than 400 actions based on § 2 that have resulted in judicial decisions. The majority concludes that all of those cases should have been dismissed because § 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not confer a voting right. Consistent with all other courts to address the issue, I conclude that § 2 confers an individual right and that the enforcement scheme described in the Act is not incompatible with private enforcement under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.' Plaintiffs may now try to take this case to the entire 8th Circuit to reconsider, but that did not work with an appeal of the 2023 case. Otherwise, plaintiffs will face a difficult choice. If plaintiffs leave this case as is, Section 2 will be a dead letter in the states covered by the 8th Circuit: Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. If the Supreme Court takes the case, there are already two votes likely to side with the 8th Circuit. If a majority embraces the bad reasoning of the 8th Circuit, Section 2 would be dead throughout the entire country. Of course, one hopes that a Supreme Court majority would reject this attempt to shut down the Voting Rights Act, just like it rejected different extreme arguments made by Alabama a few years ago in another Section 2 case, Allen v. Milligan. But nothing about protection of voting rights can be taken for granted these days, and I'm glad I am not the one who has to make the call about whether to enter the ring at the Supreme Court.
Calgary Herald
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Calgary Herald
How many Canadians voted in the federal election? What we know about the turnout
Article content Voter participation in the largely Trump-driven federal election was among the largest since the free-trade election of 1988, when Canada's ties with the U.S. last took centre stage in a campaign. Article content As of 12:16 p.m. ET Tuesday, Elections Canada reported that 19,217,335 registered electors — 67.35 per cent — had cast a ballot, whether in-person on Monday or during the four-day advance polling period on Easter weekend when a record-breaking 7.3 million-plus voted. Article content Article content However, the final figure doesn't yet include those who registered on election day or the results of roughly 560 polls left to tally after Elections Canada paused counting of special ballots early Tuesday morning. Article content Article content Special ballots are cast by mail or in person at any election office if the person cannot or does not want to vote in advance or on election day. Tabulating resumed at 9:30 a.m., and the agency's results page is being regularly updated. Article content This year's sum has already surpassed the 62.6 per cent in 2021. Article content Per Elections Canada, the last time more than 70 per cent of eligible voters took part in an election was in 1988, when 75.3 per cent exercised their right as incumbent prime minister Brian Mulroney and the Progressive Conservatives collected a second straight majority government. Article content Article content The largest ever turnout was 79.4 per cent in 1958, the year Tory John Diefenbaker routed the Liberals and Lester B. Pearson. The lowest, 58.8 per cent, was in 2008 as Stephen Harper's Conservatives collected a slightly stronger minority. Article content Article content Provincially, Prince Edward Island had the most eligible voters at 75.9 per cent as of Tuesday morning, and Newfoundland and Labrador had the smallest turnout at 65.5 per cent. Average turnout in the rest of Canada was roughly 68 per cent. Article content
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump is knowingly steering the economy off the cliff with tariffs
Over the weekend, Donald Trump's reassurance of a more generous approach to tariffs was reversed again, apparently returning to draconian across-the-board 20% tariffs. The president's imminent Rose Garden 'Liberation Day' announcement of universal tariffs on everything coming into the U.S. from everyone—accompanied by the Trump-driven 10% decline in the stock market over the last month—is just the latest example of how Trump's capricious tariff tantrums are steering the U.S. economy straight off the cliff. Given the near unanimous chorus of business leaders and economists, one must wonder what motivates Trump's destructive decrees. As Trump himself confessed this weekend on NBC, 'I couldn't care less if car prices go up!' The problem is not tariffs—the problem is Donald Trump, plain and simple. Per our Yale CEO Caucus survey results, 90% of CEOs actually support tariffs, when they are used strategically and selectively. These business leaders support the use of selective tariffs to rectify genuine trade imbalances and constrain foreign dumping into the U.S., undermining U.S. producers in sectors such as steel. But these worthy goals often seem to be subjugated to Trump's personality-driven vendettas, such as punishing longtime nemesis Justin Trudeau; and even more importantly, Trump's idiosyncratic, capricious rollout of tariffs has made it all but impossible for companies to invest at all, hampering Trump's own stated goal of bringing investment and jobs back to the U.S. Already, there is a confusing array of 12,500 tariff categories across 200 trading partners. We tallied up Trump's tariff pronouncements over the last two months and found no less than a head-spinning 107 instances of paradoxical flip-flops on tariff policy, often with same-day reversals. That does not even account for often contradictory guidance from Trump's deputies, which are then subsequently overruled by Trump himself. Businesses need predictability and stability; no company can authorize billions in capital spending to build new plants or hire new workers when trade policy changes not day by day, not hour by hour, but in some cases, literally minute by minute. During our Yale CEO Caucus this month, CEOs groaned and cringed each time CNBC's Eamon Javers read off a new tariff policy reversal, with seven flip-flops over our three-hour event. Trump's defenders argue this is all part of his 'art of the deal'—to punch counterparties in the face so hard that they are knocked off balance and are all but begging for a deal. But the reality is, Trump is getting snookered in these deals, as companies merely repackage existing and preplanned capex spending into gauzy, headline-drawing 'announcements' of 'new investments' in the U.S. The veneer of glitz and glamour of fawning Oval Office press conferences announcing these new investments hides a much seamier reality, as much-ballyhooed new 'investments' such as Foxconn's planned $10 billion electronics factory in Wisconsin turn into abandoned shadows and idled plants. Meanwhile, foreign leaders and companies offer token concessions with little genuine benefit to the U.S., while racing to evade tariffs by rerouting supply chains through neutral countries, brazenly and openly defying Trump while paying lip service to his whims. That is why 90% of CEOs polled at our Yale CEO Caucus said that Trump's tariffs are backfiring on the U.S. These CEOs, like everyone else, are looking at ample data pointing to the widespread havoc wrought by Trump's tariff tantrums. Not only have Trump's botched tariff tantrums helped chop about $7 trillion in value off the stock market since his inauguration—enough to fund the government for an entire year—but the costs are being felt in the real economy. Far from bringing manufacturing and jobs back to the U.S., Trump is killing American manufacturing, hurting U.S. workers, and bringing the entire U.S. economy down with him. Inflation expectations have jumped to 32-year highs; consumer confidence has plunged 25% across both the University of Michigan and Conference Board surveys as consumer spending falls the most in five years; NFIB Small Business confidence has plunged 50%; the labor market is deteriorating as the number of new layoffs quadrupled over the last three months; capital spending and investments have come to a standstill; and GDP growth forecasts have come down by 1%—a head-spinning reversal of economic fortune as the initial euphoria of Trump's pledges of tax cuts and deregulation morphed into the Frankenstein monster of all tariffs, all the time. Of course, many business leaders wonder what motivates Trump's destructive tariff tantrums. On one hand, Trump has obsessed over tariffs since at least the 1980s; and he has long, reductionistically viewed the U.S. balance of trade as if he were still running the Trump Organization, which tries to sell more than it buys every year. But the sheer, avoidable, intentional chaos of Trump's tariff rollout, and his willingness to ignore significant stock market drawdowns, suggest there may be other explanatory factors. Some CEOs have privately suggested that Trump may be trying to induce a recession early in his term to 'clear the deck' well before midterm elections—though that assumes a greater facility for long-term strategic foresight than is usually associated with Trump. More likely, perhaps Trump has no plan and is just making things up on the fly, with arbitrary megalomaniacal impulses unconstrained by yes-men staff. In Trump's tantrums, psychoanalysts might find strong resemblance to what Sigmund Freud called the 'death drive' pathology of entrepreneurs, or what psychiatrists term the self-destructive impulse—akin to a child on the beach who builds a beautiful castle and kicks it down. Forty-two years ago, Abraham Zaleznik, a psychoanalyst management scholar at the Harvard Business School, explained that many times, such entrepreneurial leaders as Trump and Musk are driven by an ultimately self-destructive megalomania, rooted in a bad relationship with a parent who disparaged them but is no longer around to be proven wrong. Zaleznik stated, 'In their climb to the top, they have certain fantasies having to do with creating a new world. There is a search for restitution—to remake the world, remake their childhood, remake a relationship with a parent. They fall prey to the Midas theory. Everything they touch will turn to gold, and if it doesn't they go bonkers. I think if we want to understand the entrepreneur we should look at the juvenile delinquent. I think there are a lot of similarities. They both have an under-developed super-ego. And so they don't understand right from wrong.' Trump's 'Liberation Day' has turned into a nightmare for U.S. businesses. The real liberation the U.S. economy needs is a more orderly, strategic approach to tariffs, liberated from Trump's idiosyncratic whims. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the Lester Crown Professor in Management Practice and president and founder of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute. Steven Tian is the director of research at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute. Stephen Henriques is a senior research fellow at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute and a former McKinsey & Co. consultant. The opinions expressed in commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. Read more: Trump's trade and tariffs policies are flawed and contradictory—and the 'Mar-a-Lago accord' is suited for the trash bin Trump tariffs: Stealing from the China playbook—to boost car making in America Tariffs won't make America great again: Export-Import Bank's former chairman and president This story was originally featured on
The Guardian
01-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Who actually runs Columbia University?
Late on Friday evening, the trustees of Columbia University announced that its interim president, Katrina Armstrong, was leaving her post. Six days earlier, she had convened an emergency meeting with 75 faculty after the university had cravenly surrendered to the demands of the Trump administration in the hopes of recovering $400m in federal grants and contracts. The president and her staff called their predicament 'heartbreaking' and sought to reassure faculty that academic freedom and departmental autonomy remained intact. A transcript of the meeting was leaked. Two days later, the president was 'returning to lead' the university's medical center. She was replaced by a trustee. For a member of the board of trustees to assume leadership of the university, without even the fig leaf of faculty consultation, has never occurred in the 271-year history of Columbia. Unprecedented in its own right, the episode also exposes a deeply worrisome problem of governance in American higher education. This has been building for years, but now the stakes are higher than ever: the very survival of the university as we know it. American universities, in their recent dealings with the federal government – and with their own trustees – have repeatedly shown themselves incapable of preserving the core values of academic freedom and shared governance. This failure has been widely noted, but unasked is who bears responsibility. Who precisely decides to surrender those values, whether at private institutions like Columbia, Harvard or the University of Pennsylvania, or at public ones like the University of North Carolina or the University of Minnesota? The ultimate decision-maker at colleges and universities is the board of trustees. And these boards, as the explosive events of the past year demonstrate, have serious problems, both in how they are constituted and how they lead. Those committed to the distinctive strengths of the university as a maker, teacher and custodian of knowledge, both old and new, must at long last try to grasp why these boards are failing and figure out how to fix them. Trustees (sometimes called governors, regents, visitors, or 'members of the corporation') have a lofty function: to ensure the financial health and stability of the institution, partly through their own donations. This fiduciary responsibility has extended to the recruitment, appointment and retention of the president, and sometimes of other senior administrators, usually (as at Columbia) with little substantive faculty consultation required by the norms of shared governance. Trustees play an increasingly active role in academic decisions through the levers of cost, donor power and financial austerity. In our fraught times, these levers are in increasing use, especially by the Trump-driven Republican party, to target disciplines, departments, and individual professors. Many boards have become political wolves in the guise of fiduciary sheep. Boards of trustees are essentially private clubs, which follow their own, always confidential, norms to determine who is asked to join, who controls key committees, and who is gently persuaded to resign when they do not meet the criteria of the most influential trustees. (In some private institutions, presidents may have a say in who gets selected as trustees, but presidents themselves are appointed by trustees.) At public universities, these boards are directly tied to the powers of state legislatures and administrators and thus are at the mercy of state politics in key matters. In private ones, the club is dominated by heavy hitters in business, law and technology; the number of alumni, academics and students is vanishingly small. These business-oriented trustees (a majority being white and male) treat their board meetings as golf parties; they schmooze, network and discuss deals while going through the motions of discussing university policies and priorities. Who becomes a trustee? At Columbia there are 21, all of them from business, law and technology, with the exception of a former journalist. Although they are in charge of an academic institution, none of them is an academic. None as ever led a classroom or a lab meeting or medical rounds with interns. None has gone through the process of tenure, where their teaching, publication record and service are rigorously assessed by colleagues in the field both from within the institution and outside it. None as ever had their work peer-reviewed by anonymous readers or panels of experts. None has ever published in academic or scientific journals or presses and had their ideas debated in the public sphere. None has ever framed a hypothesis and tested it on the basis of evidence they have collected. None, in short, has sought truth and had their search confirmed by objective scholars and scientists. How, we ask, can people be entrusted with running a university when they have no lived experience with or understanding of its core functions and aims? What qualifications do such trustees bring to their office beside the capacity and expectation to donate? And what do those qualifications, which pertain to private profit, have to do with the concerns of scholars and scientists and doctors, which pertain to the public good? Universities are replicating the plutocratic domination of the Trump administration. Is it any wonder, then, that Columbia's trustees are prepared to ignore the foundational values that constitute a university – academic freedom and shared governance – in order to reach an accommodation with the federal government? The Columbia board is by no means unique. The same situation prevails, with few exceptions, across the Ivy League and its peer institutions (exemplary is the University of Chicago). As far as public universities are concerned, though there are some variations among several of the flagships, such as the regents of the universities of California, Michigan and Wisconsin, they are typically composed of lawyers, politicians and businessmen, and generally appointed by governors of individual states. Their accountability is hard to locate in their charter documents, and their near-autonomous powers are wide-ranging. In these regards, they are very much like their private counterparts. These facts would be sobering enough as evidence of the longstanding privilege and exclusivity of boards of trustees and their role in bringing bigger political and economic agendas into the heart of academic governance. But there is an even more worrisome issue. Boards are accountable to no one – only to themselves, and to some vague set of norms, often unwritten, about their obligations. Accountability is for faculty, administrators, and students. Given the remarkable absence of any mechanism for assessing, monitoring, or auditing their performance, should we be surprised if trustees bring the most intense political agendas into the heart of the institutions they oversee? With their powerful connections to local, state and federal agendas and networks, trustees become conduits for politicians and finance-driven values that affect the core life of academic institutions rather than buffers against these forces. (A Penn trustee was accused by the faculty last year of attempting a 'hostile takeover' of the university.) The most urgent need today, as the Columbia case shows, is to create a new social contract on boards of trustees, who have become too craven to be watchdogs and too self-interested to be trusted. This change will require hard community-based activism that balances lawyers, hedge fund managers and tech bros with professors, schoolteachers, researchers, scientists, and students. For public institutions, this may require legal support, as well as a powerful alliance between communities and state governors. Without such changes in boards of trustees, the current capture of colleges and universities by an unholy alliance of wealthy alums, rightwing billionaires and bureaucrats is likely to become entrenched. Creating this new social contract will require two crucial steps. The first is to bring the full force of public scrutiny to bear on boards, their membership, their accountability, and the checks on their powers. The second is to demand that all academic governing boards both reflect and defend the fundamental values of universities in a liberal democracy: freedom of academic speech, opinion and inquiry; procedural transparency; and demographic diversity. There are many universities left on the government's hit lists, and before they lose their souls, their boards of trustees must be held to account. Arjun Appadurai, professor emeritus at New York University, is the former provost of the New School. Sheldon Pollock is professor emeritus, Columbia University, and former chair of its department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies
Shafaq News
14-03-2025
- Business
- Shafaq News
Oil bounces as Ukraine ceasefire deal remains elusive
Shafaq News/ Oil prices rebounded on Friday to recover some of their more than 1% losses in the previous session, partly due to diminishing prospects of a quick end to the Ukraine war that could bring back more Russian energy supplies. Brent crude futures rose 46 cents, or 0.7%, to $70.34 a barrel by 0406 GMT after settling 1.5% lower in the previous session. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude was at $67.03 a barrel, up 48 cents, or 0.7%, after closing down 1.7% on Thursday. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Moscow supported a U.S. proposal for a ceasefire in Ukraine in principle, but sought a number of clarifications and conditions that appeared to rule out a quick end to the fighting. "Russia's tepid support of a 30-day cease-fire proposal with Ukraine has reduced confidence around a ceasefire in the short term," IG market analyst Tony Sycamore said. "The feeling is that U.S. won't lift sanctions until they agree a ceasefire." However, the global trade war that has roiled financial markets and raised recession fears is escalating with U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday threatening to slap a 200% tariff on wine, cognac and other alcohol imports from Europe. The International Energy Agency warned on Thursday that global oil supply could exceed demand by around 600,000 barrels per day this year, due to growth led by the United States and weaker than expected global demand. "The macroeconomic conditions that underpin our oil demand projections deteriorated over the past month as trade tensions escalated between the U.S. and several other countries," the IEA said, prompting it to revise down its demand growth estimates for the fourth quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025. The Trump-driven trade war woes and demand worries dented oil prices on the previous day, though the possibility of less Russian oil in the global markets in the near term provided some cushion during Friday's trade. "Most price projections were to the downside in the short term, but geopolitical tension could still cause supply disruptions," ANZ analysts said in a note to clients.
