Новости за 28.09.2020

Donald Trump’s previously undisclosed tax records, the subject of so much Democratic speculation since 2016, are finally public, thanks to a New York Times report released over the weekend. It was hardly a shock to learn that Trump—estimated by Forbes to be worth around $2.5 billion—had paid a scant $750 in income taxes in 2016, and nothing at all during 10 of the 15 years prior to that. (For contrast, supposedly freeloading undocumented workers paid an estimated $12 billion to Social Security... Читать дальше...

What would it take for a story about Donald Trump to be surprising? This is, after all, someone who has, in the past few days alone, refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power in November and demanded that his opponent take a drug test before an upcoming presidential debate. The release of the pee tape, an actual murder on Fifth Avenue—these might raise an eyebrow. But at this point, the most surprising thing Donald Trump could do is not act like Donald Trump—not be a venal cretin for the first time in his life. Читать дальше...

Whenever I mix up words or forget what I was trying to say, I make fun of myself by saying “words are my craft, you know.” It’s funny because it’s true: I have one job, and it is to use words well, which doesn’t seem like much of a tall order. Yet political reporters seem to struggle with this constantly, having been confounded by President Trump’s unprecedentedly wily ways: He lies all the time and is also quite dumb. Four years in, journalists still struggle with this norm-smashing combination... Читать дальше...

On September 4, 2017, Hurricane Irma became the first Category 5 hurricane of the season, with sustained winds of 180 miles per hour at its peak. The storm slammed into Cudjoe Key, Florida, as a Category 4, on the morning of September 10.

In 2005, long before Occupy Wall Street, the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, or Bernie Sanders’s bid for the presidency, Citigroup released a report that outlined the transformation of the United States into a highly unequal “plutonomy,” in which money and power were concentrated in the hands of a very few people at the top. But rather than sounding an alarm,  the report was only meant to advise investors on how better to take advantage of the trend. Since... Читать дальше...

On April 28, 2014, a fishing trawler intercepted an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman, a day after the tanker had left Dubai for Greece. Three men climbed aboard the tanker and spent the night packing hundreds of small sacks of heroin, weighing at least two metric tons in total, into its ballast boxes. After they finished, two of the men sailed back to the coast. One stayed behind. He carried a handgun and ordered the tanker’s crew to keep sailing.

I recently wrote about the pernicious effect of Milton Friedman’s idea that public corporations should focus exclusively on shareholders, ignoring the interests of other stakeholders including employees, customers, and the communities in which companies operate. The single-minded focus on maximizing shareholder value has caused companies to sacrifice long-term value for short-term profits and, ironically, enriched corporate executives at the expense of shareholders.