The Editorial Board

The Federal Trade Commission issued a $5 billion fine against Facebook on Wednesday. It’s an eye-popping number for sure, one that blows previous fines out of the water.

It’s a number that makes for impressive headlines, but it is largely meaningless. Facebook posted $15 billion in revenue last quarter, at which point it announced that it had set aside $3 billion to pay potential fines. Facebook’s stock price barely budged when the size of the expected fine was first reported this month. After the FTC’s official announcement on Wednesday, the stock price closed slightly higher than at opening.

The weightlessness of the fine isn’t the only problem with the deal. The settlement order grants Facebook and its officers immunity in a wide range of possible misdeeds committed before June 12. The agency has also declined to hold Mark Zuckerberg — or anyone else — personally liable for Facebook’s repeated privacy violations. Come again?

Yes, Facebook has agreed to sweeping new oversight of how the company handles personal data, which includes information like names, phone numbers, IP addresses and even biometric information. But the oversight largely consists of a mandatory privacy program to be created by Facebook, for Facebook.

The company agreed to a privacy program back in 2011 when it first got into trouble with the FTC. The new privacy program is much more stringently outlined, but it is not enough. In the words of Commissioner Rohit Chopra, who cast one of two dissenting votes on the new deal: “The settlement imposes no meaningful changes to the company’s structure or financial incentives, which led to these violations. Nor does it include any restrictions on the company’s mass surveillance or advertising tactics.”

All it takes to show the fundamental dysfunction at the heart of American privacy law is to revisit the story of how we got to this $5 billion fine.

In 2010, Facebook changed its privacy controls without warning its users, when it started “Instant Personalization” — where the site handed personal data over to third parties like Pandora and Yelp without informing users ahead of time. It kicked off enough of a controversy that four senators objected and the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the FTC.

The commission found that Facebook had engaged in “unfair and deceptive practices” through its actions. “Facebook represented that third-party apps that users installed would have access only to user information that they needed to operate,” the FTC said in 2011. “In fact, the apps could access nearly all of users’ personal data — data the apps didn’t need.”

Facebook repented and settled with the FTC, placing itself under a consent decree. The agreement required Facebook to stop making “misrepresentations” about users’ privacy and security, to create a comprehensive privacy program to deal with the user data it was charged with sharing, and to audit its privacy program every two years for the next 20 years.

Under the agreement Facebook is liable for up to $16,000 (adjusted for inflation) a day per infraction. It’s not just that Facebook, a more than $570 billion company, should have known better. It did know better. The FTC has it in writing.

Three years later, Facebook allowed a personality test app to harvest data on nearly 87 million people — data that was fed to a political consultancy called Cambridge Analytica, in order to develop psychological profiles of American voters.

On its own, what happened between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica may not have been explicitly illegal under American law, but Facebook’s actions did violate the consent decree.

The Federal Trade Commission is also responsible for this state of affairs — its lenient attitude toward Silicon Valley allowed the industry to misbehave. And when the FTC did strive to protect Americans’ privacy, its resources were never quite enough to stand up to tech giants. The budget of the agency — of which its digital privacy division is only a small part — is smaller than the office of the California attorney general. Yet this is an agency expected to police companies valued at half a trillion dollars.

On the same day that the FTC announced the new settlement and $5 billion fine on Facebook, the company disclosed that it was the subject of an antitrust investigation by the agency, and possibly by the Justice Department as well. But despite renewed interest in antitrust for the tech industry, antitrust law itself must evolve before robust government oversight has any chance of taking place.

This week, Zuckerberg announced major changes to his company’s privacy protections. “Overall, these changes go beyond anything required under U.S. law today,” he wrote in a Facebook post. He is right. And that’s a profound condemnation of American privacy laws.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/opinion/facebook-fine-5-billion.html" id="a51d4bce-5fa3-3b45-aa98-ec71092c89cf">The New York Times</a>.

A $5 Billion Fine for Facebook Won’t Fix Privacy

Editorials of The Times

‘They’re Doing It as We Sit Here’

If you were searching for a metaphor for the withering ideal of American public service — the one that puts country before party, truth before “narrative” or “brand” — it’d be hard to do better than the painful spectacle of Robert Mueller trying, in his halting voice, to sound the alarm Wednesday about Russian subversion of American democracy.

It’s the same alarm that virtually every member of America’s intelligence and law enforcement communities has been ringing for the past three years: Russia attacked our elections in 2016 and is intensifying its efforts today. “It wasn’t a single attempt,” Mueller said. “They’re doing it as we sit here.”

Appearing before two congressional committees rife with politicians intent on using him to fill out their own versions of reality, Mueller seemed frail and at times even confused. But he successfully rebuffed nearly all efforts to draw him beyond the boundaries of evidence established in the report he delivered about Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The exceptions came when representatives actually showed an interest in Russian meddling and Donald Trump’s embrace of it. “I hope this is not the new normal,” Mueller said at one point, in response to a question about whether American candidates might now feel free to welcome foreign influence, “but I fear it is.”

The “sweeping and systemic” nature of that interference was the most unequivocal finding of Mueller’s 448-page report, although just as disturbing was the report’s meticulous recounting of the ways the Trump campaign accepted and even encouraged it.

A few of the more egregious examples: Throughout 2016, the report found, Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, gave private polling information to Russian agents and shared campaign strategy with them; in June 2016, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, arranged a meeting with Russians at Trump Tower in the expectation of getting “dirt” on the Hillary Clinton campaign; on July 27 of that year, candidate Trump publicly called on the Russians to hack Clinton’s emails, five hours before they attempted to do just that; the campaign then devised its strategy and created its messages around WikiLeaks’s releases of stolen files from the Democratic National Committee.

Nearly all Republicans on both committees failed even to acknowledge the threat posed by Russia and other countries. With significant exceptions like Will Hurd, representative of Texas, Republican lawmakers seemed much more focused on protecting Trump and deflecting any concerns about electoral security by impugning Mueller’s integrity, attacking the origins of an investigation that he did not initiate, and — in one particularly disgraceful jab by Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania — accusing his investigative process of being “un-American.”

In another era — the time Mueller seemed to hail from — an attack by a foreign government to divide Americans and upend their elections might have produced a different response. It might have drawn legislators together to develop a bipartisan initiative to make clear, as Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, put it, “that we, the people — not some foreign power that wishes us ill — we decide who shall govern us.”

Yet for all the bluster and misdirection — about Fusion GPS, the Steele dossier, the texts of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — the Republicans offered little pushback against Mueller’s key revelations.

Of course Trump and his senior campaign staffers and associates didn’t worry that what they were doing was wrong. The 2016 campaign was providing too many opportunities to pad their bank accounts. From Manafort’s efforts to leverage his position to extract himself from a multimillion-dollar debt to Trump’s own attempts to build a giant hotel in Moscow, self-dealing permeated the Trump campaign. Remember, as late as weeks before the election, Trump and most of his top advisers thought he had no chance of winning. The real purpose of the campaign was to build up the Trump brand and be the “greatest infomercial in political history,” as Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, phrased it.

Narrow self-interest explains Trump’s attitude toward the WikiLeaks releases, which he should have decried but instead praised as a “treasure trove.” When Mueller was asked to comment on Trump’s reaction, he again ventured a bit beyond his report and said, “Problematic is an understatement.”

Trump has pretty much had one rejoinder to the report’s revelations: “No collusion.” But as Mueller’s testimony made clear, that’s misleading. For one thing, collusion is a legally meaningless term in this context. The special counsel’s office was looking for evidence of criminal conspiracy, and its failure to find a sufficient amount to bring charges may have been due in part to the efforts of Trump campaign members and associates to cover their tracks or otherwise obstruct the investigation.

With regard to obstruction, Mueller found himself in an impossible position. A prosecutor’s job is to find the facts and decide whether to bring criminal charges. But while Mueller was obligated to do the first by the terms of his appointment, he was prohibited from doing the second by prevailing Justice Department policy, which says a sitting president may not be indicted. As a result, the report he produced exists in an unsettling limbo — documenting evidence that Trump may have committed federal crimes yet studiously refusing to take a position on whether he in fact did so.

Republican lawmakers expressed understandable frustration that Mueller had cast suspicion on Trump without formally charging him with anything. Particularly after all the talk of locking Clinton up during and after the 2016 campaign, it was good to hear them defend the presumption of innocence as a core American principle. Mueller’s unsatisfying response was, essentially: My hands are tied.

At least twice Mueller called for legislation to improve information-sharing and other coordination among intelligence agencies — an objective that was supposed to have been met with reforms after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But that kind of concerted legislative action seems unlikely. To this day, Trump refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of Russian intervention, and the Republican-controlled Senate is unwilling to consider legislation for enhanced election security — maybe because doing either could be seen as an admission that the election was tainted.

Conceding the obvious might seem like a small price to pay. But the president appears more concerned with nursing his ego than safeguarding American democracy — and that puts us all, Republicans, Democrats and independents, at risk.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/opinion/robert-mueller-report-testimony.html" id="40225288-f682-3cb7-a57b-5c554711026e">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial)

The back-to-back appearances before congressional committees on Wednesday by Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, are being hyped like the Super Bowl. Many critics of President Donald Trump are hoping the event — nationally televised and slated to run roughly five hours — will be a turning point that will not only reveal Trump to be unfit for office but also guarantee his political downfall, if not via impeachment then by a crushing defeat in 2020.

They shouldn’t hold their breath. Mueller’s appearance is unlikely to produce any shocking revelations, no matter how clever or aggressive lawmakers’ questioning.

This does not mean the hearings are without merit. Far from it. Despite all the political heat surrounding the Russia investigation, most Americans will never read the Mueller report. Many have only a vague sense of what it says — or, worse still, their perception of it is inaccurate, thanks to the efforts of Trump and his defenders to distract from and distort the findings.

Even if Mueller refuses to say anything beyond the contents of his report — as is expected — his televised testimony can serve as a valuable explainer and a much-needed corrective. As goes the analogy making its way around political circles: People aren’t reading the book, but they will watch the movie.

Aware of the political risks of overpromising, House Democrats have stressed that they are not looking for any new bombshells from Mueller. Rather, they want him to illuminate some of the most damning bits of his report.

“It’s a pretty dry, prosecutorial work product,” Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, said of the Mueller report in a Sunday interview. “We want Bob Mueller to bring it to life.”

This calls for considerable finesse. Democrats must press Mueller to be clear and forthcoming, without looking as if they are badgering him, piling on or pressing him to draw conclusions not supported by the evidence.

To maximize efficiency, Democrats on the two committees have divvied up the lines of inquiry. The Judiciary Committee, which has three hours to question Mueller, will focus on possible obstruction of justice by the president and those in his circle, while the Intelligence Committee, which has two hours, will dig into Trump associates’ interactions with Russia.

Among the bigger-picture questions Democrats will pursue are why Mueller did not insist on an interview with the president as part of his investigation and whether Trump’s actions would merit indictment if he were not president of the United States.

More specifically, Judiciary Committee members will press Mueller to expand on a handful of the dozen or so episodes of potential obstruction cited in his report — including Trump ordering Don McGahn, the White House counsel at the time, to fire Mueller, then later instructing McGahn to deny any such effort. The Trump administration has blocked McGahn himself, along with many others named in the report, from testifying before Congress.

Complicating matters, Mueller is seen as, if not a hostile witness, at least a grudging one. In his brief public statement on his report in May, he all but begged Congress not to force him to testify and warned that, if called, he would provide no information beyond the scope of his report. “The report is my testimony,” he asserted.

Lawmakers have held mock sessions, running through practice questions and fine-tuning them to be as pointed — and un-duckable — as possible. On “Fox News Sunday” this weekend, Jerrold Nadler, the Judiciary Committee chairman, offered an example of how this could go: “‘Look at Page 344, Paragraph 2. Please read it. Does that describe obstruction of justice? Did you find that the president did that?’”

That said, Democrats acknowledge that it will be a challenge to get anything new out of Mueller. As Schiff recently joked, “We have a far better chance of the love affair in North Korea working out” than of getting Mueller to say whether Trump should be indicted after leaving office.

With this in mind, Schiff noted that he and his fellow Democrats “have to decide how much of our time we want to spend fighting with him to discuss things outside the report.”

The House Democratic leadership has warned members against grandstanding.

Republicans also will be aiming to keep their team from overreaching and appearing too partisan in their attacks on Mueller, who is widely respected. It bears recalling that Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, has been among Congress’ most fervent crusaders in trying to discredit the Mueller investigation. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, put out a report titled “Mueller Unmasked” that claimed to expose “the disreputable, twisted history” of the special counsel.

Looking to stir up trouble, Trump has waded into the drama. On Monday, he tweeted out fresh insults of Mueller and warned that the hearings would end badly for Democrats. He even found a way to work in Hillary Clinton, claiming, bizarrely, that all of her people had been “given immunity.”

This is just the kind of nonsense that Trump has long used to try to undermine the special counsel’s work — and it’s why Mueller’s testimony, even if it reveals little new, could be so important to public understanding of these issues.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/opinion/mueller-testimony.html" id="91e346d4-dc21-3e8d-ad37-105b9a47ee3e">The New York Times</a>.

Ask Mueller Anything. The Facts Won’t Change.

One of the striking warnings in a recent Pentagon white paper on the growing strategic threat from Russia is that its president, Vladimir Putin, could pull a “reverse Nixon” and play his own version of the “China card” with the United States, a reference to the former president’s strategy of playing those two adversaries against each other.

Until recently, any relationship between Russia and China could largely be dismissed as a marriage of convenience with limited effect on American interests. But since Western nations imposed sanctions on Russia after it invaded Ukraine in 2014, Chinese and Russian authorities have increasingly found common cause, disparaging Western-style democracy and offering themselves as alternatives to America’s postwar leadership. Now China and Russia are growing even closer, suggesting a more permanent arrangement that could pose a complex challenge to the United States.

“The world system, and American influence in it, would be completely upended if Moscow and Beijing aligned more closely,” John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, wrote in the report, to which Defense Department officials and other analysts contributed.

The latest evidence of warming ties was a meeting last month in Moscow at which Putin thanked the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, for enabling the two countries to do more than $100 billion worth of trade in 2018, up 30% from the previous year, and an implicit rebuke to America’s trade standoff with China. The two countries also signed more than two dozen agreements. That meeting came shortly after Xi called Putin his “best and bosom friend.”

The leaders have met almost 30 times since 2013. Russia recently agreed to sell China its latest military technology, including S400 surface-to-air missiles and SU-35 fighter jets.

While China and Russia have conducted joint military exercises intermittently for more than a decade, they began naval maneuvers in the Mediterranean in 2012 and last fall staged what Russia called their biggest war games in decades in eastern Siberia. They plan to hold joint exercises on a regular basis in the future.

With melting ice opening new opportunities for oil and gas exploration, researchers from the two nations recently agreed to open a joint Arctic research center. They often vote alike at the United Nations and have similar positions on Iran and North Korea. Both have become much more active in the Middle East, where Russia is trying to regain its standing as a major power and China is trying to cultivate relations with energy suppliers like Iran.

The Pentagon white paper, and a separate report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, warn that the United States and its allies are not moving fast enough to counter efforts by Russia and China to foment instability with “gray zone” tactics that fall short of military involvement — the use of proxy forces, political and economic coercion, disinformation, cyberoperations, and jamming technologies against American satellites.

In his State of the Nation address in February, Putin expressed confidence that ties with China would enhance Russian security and prosperity, especially as he aligns his Eurasian Economic Union plan with China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, a colossal infrastructure program designed to link China with Asia, Africa and Europe.

Given its economic, military and technological trajectory, together with its authoritarian model, China, not Russia, represents by far the greater challenge to American objectives over the long term. That means President Donald Trump is correct to try to establish a sounder relationship with Russia and peel it away from China. But his approach has been ham-handed and at times even counter to American interests and values. America can’t seek warmer relations with a rival power at the price of ignoring its interference in American democracy. Yet even during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union often made progress in one facet of their relationship while they remained in conflict over other aspects.

The United States and Russia could expand their cooperation in space. The United States is already dependent on Russian rockets to reach the International Space Station. They could also continue to work closely in the Arctic, as members of the Arctic Council that has negotiated legally binding agreements governing search and rescue operations and responses to oil spills. And they could revive cooperation on arms control, especially by extending the New START treaty. It was encouraging that top State Department officials met their Russian counterparts twice in recent weeks, including in Geneva on Wednesday, although there was no immediate sign that the two sides made any progress on arms control or other major issues.

Given their history, China and Russia may never reach a formal alliance. The two have been divided by war and ideological rivalries and even now compete for influence in East Asia, Central Asia and the Arctic. Their contrasting trajectories would also make an alliance difficult. China is a rising power and the dominant partner; Russia is declining. China has the world’s second largest economy; Russia’s is not even in the top 10.

Still, their shared objectives could increase, further threatening Western interests. America needs to rally its democratic allies, rather than berate them, and project a more confident vision of its own political and economic model.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/opinion/russia-china-trump.html" id="84586ed9-ac26-3214-a92e-ef2c691b3ca0">The New York Times</a>.

What’s America’s Winning Hand if Russia Plays the China Card?

Low-income households in Illinois pay about 14 cents in state and local taxes from every dollar of income, while the state’s most affluent households pay about 7 cents per dollar.

That gap between the poor and the wealthy in Illinois is one of the largest in any state, but the poor pay taxes at higher rates in 45 of the 50 states, according to a 2018 study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

It’s a bipartisan phenomenon. The institute’s list of the 10 states with the most regressive tax systems — the states doing the most to increase inequality through taxation — also includes conservative Tennessee and Texas, purple Nevada and Florida, and liberal Washington.

Now Illinois is trying to take its name off the list. The state plans to hold a referendum next year on a constitutional amendment that would authorize the state to tax higher incomes at progressively higher rates — the system used by the federal government and 32 states.

Illinois currently taxes income at a flat rate of 4.95%. Under the proposed system, income below $100,000 would be taxed at a slightly lower rate. Income up to $250,000 would be taxed at the current rate. And income above that amount would be taxed at rates of up to 7.99%. There is also a kind of millionaire’s tax: Individuals making more than $750,000, or couples making more than $1 million, would pay the 7.99% rate on all their income.

Economic inequality in the United States has reached the highest levels since the 1920s, and there is mounting evidence that the unequal distribution of income and wealth is contributing to the nation’s economic and political problems. Reducing inequality ought to be a focus of public policy. Rewriting state tax laws to place the greater burden on those with greater means is an effective and sensible response.

Taxation in the United States remains progressive because the federal income tax remains the largest source of government revenue. But the distribution of the total burden has become much less progressive. In 1961, Americans with the highest incomes paid an average of 51.5% of that income in federal, state and local taxes. Half a century later, in 2011, Americans with the highest incomes paid just 33.2% of their income in taxes, according to a study by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman published last year. Over that same period, the bottom 90% of Americans, ranked by income, saw their tax burden increase from 22.3% of income to 26% of income.

(Since 2011, federal income taxation has increased under President Barack Obama and declined under President Donald Trump. Data on the full impact of those countervailing changes is not yet available.)

The headline problem is that Congress sharply reduced taxation of the wealthy, cutting top income tax rates as well as corporate and estate taxation.

Meanwhile, the tax burden on everyone else has increased. One reason is the gradual rise of federal payroll taxation, the flat-rate income tax that provides funding for Social Security and Medicare. The Social Security tax is particularly regressive because it applies only to income up to $132,900. The relative scale of state and local taxation also has risen, partly because the federal government increasingly funds its operations with borrowed money rather than tax dollars.

State and local governments rely heavily on sales and property taxes, which impose a greater burden on less affluent households because wealthier people typically spend a smaller share of income on food, housing and other forms of consumption. In roughly one-third of states, this effect is partly offset by progressive income taxation. But even in most of those states, the overall burden still falls more heavily on those with lower incomes. Only a handful of states — California, Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey and Vermont — and the District of Columbia have written their tax laws so that those with the highest incomes pay the largest share of their incomes.

The Illinois plan is a step in the right direction rather than a complete corrective. Under current law, households in the bottom quintile of the income distribution pay 14.4% of their income in taxes on average, while those in the top 1% pay 7.4% of their income in taxes — a difference of 7 percentage points. The proposed changes in the income tax would cut that gap to 4.3 percentage points, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Illinois is seeking to address long-standing fiscal problems, notably an underfunded pension system, so it is raising taxes on the rich without significantly reducing taxes for everyone else. Other states, however, could do better by raising taxes on the rich and using the money to reduce the taxation of low-income families.

Opponents of progressive taxation warn that wealthy people and businesses will flee to other states, and that those with the most money are the most mobile. People can vote with their feet, and some do prefer low-tax states like Florida. But a quick look at the list of states with progressive tax structures should make clear that plenty of rich people choose to stay put.

Indeed, Stanford sociologist Cristobal Young has calculated that people with million-dollar incomes move across state lines less often than other Americans. They are more likely to be married, more likely to have children, more likely to be involved in civic and social groups — and, in many cases, their wealth stems from their communities. A successful Springfield dentist cannot relocate her patients to Missouri. A man who owns a chain of gas stations around Peoria is likely to remain in Peoria. A company that relies on Chicago’s highly educated workforce may not be focused on finding the place with the lowest tax rates.

The potential cost of losing a few millionaires also needs to be weighed against the benefits of equitable taxation. By imposing a somewhat larger burden on high-income households, states can significantly improve the material circumstances of lower-income households and slow the troubling expansion of economic inequality.

At the very least, states ought to stop making things worse.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/opinion/sunday/inequality-taxes.html" id="dfc5bddf-5134-338d-ad59-377c27411baa">The New York Times</a>.

Economic inequality is on the rise in Illinois, and the state government is part of the problem. Illinois taxes low-income families at much higher rates than high-income families, asking the most of those who have the least.

Editorials of The Times: State and Local Taxes Are Worsening Inequality

That is the meaning of the chant of “Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!” that resounded at his rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Wednesday evening. An arena full of Trump’s supporters roared those words after Trump aimed their animosity at Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who immigrated from Somalia. He smeared her as trafficking in “vicious anti-Semitic screeds” and as a left-wing radical who sympathizes with al-Qaida, hates America and “looks down with contempt on the hard-working Americans.”

As the xenophobic chant engulfed him, the president paused, basking in the moment. He then went on to attack the three other freshman representatives — women of color, all — who are members of the so-called Squad. He suggested that Rashida Tlaib of Michigan “does not love” America and said that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York had declared “contemporary America — that’s you, that’s me, that’s all of us” — to be “garbage.”

On Thursday, as the backlash grew, including even some criticism from congressional Republicans, Trump scurried to rewrite the scene. “I was not happy with it. I disagree with it,” he said of the chant, claiming to have tried to cut it off by “speaking very quickly.” This is audacious gaslighting, even for this president. For those interested in the truth, video of the episode is a Google search away.

Presidents are not saints, and in a country with such a troubled racial history, even the greatest leaders have fallen short of promoting the principle that all people are created equal. Abraham Lincoln contended for years that the best way to deal with the legacy of slavery would be to ship African Americans to a colony in Africa or Central America. Woodrow Wilson was an unapologetic racist whose administration expelled black workers from important jobs and infused the federal government with the spirit of white supremacy.

Flash forward to the era of Lyndon B. Johnson. In his first two decades in Congress, Johnson opposed every civil rights bill to come his way — only to turn around and fight for the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and, as president, the more sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964. Historians have thoroughly documented Johnson’s fondness for racial slurs, and some people have suggested that political opportunism rather than moral concerns drove his change of heart. Whatever Johnson’s personal views, he dug in and committed to killing Jim Crow. When White House aides warned him that championing the 1964 bill was a lost cause that would ultimately damage his chances at reelection, he famously replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”

Trump appears to see the presidency as a giant megaphone for stoking racial and ethnic animus. It is not just that he pursues policies aimed at exacerbating divisions, like banning migrants from majority-Muslim nations or building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. He seeks to demonize those who oppose his policies as dangerous extremists out to destroy America. In cases where his critics are not white — whether congresswomen of color or a judge of Mexican heritage — Trump is eager to spotlight that fact.

The president is looking to divide Americans along color lines, to conjure a zero-sum vision of America in which whites must contend against nonwhites for jobs, wealth, safety and citizenship. He thinks this approach will win him another four years in the White House. At this point, does it much matter if he is acting purely out of political cynicism, with no element of personal prejudice? The rage he is nurturing and the pain he is causing are all too real. The damage he is doing will take years to undo.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/opinion/trump-rally-send-her-back.html" id="39dfbcea-3127-3aa1-a764-2e8aadca0728">The New York Times</a>.

Donald Trump insists he’s not a racist. This is, increasingly, a bit beside the point. What is excruciatingly clear, and what matters most right now, is that he has chosen to ground his politics and his presidency in fomenting racial hatred. Whatever he may feel in his bones, he is an avid race warrior.

Editorial of The Times: The Real Meaning of 'Send Her Back!'

Our planet has suffered five mass extinctions, the last of which occurred about 66 million years ago, when a giant asteroid believed to have landed near the Yucatán Peninsula set off a chain reaction that wiped out the dinosaurs and roughly three-quarters of the other species on earth. A few years ago, in a book called “The Sixth Extinction,” writer Elizabeth Kolbert warned of a devastating sequel, with plant and animal species on land and sea already disappearing at a ferocious clip, their habitats destroyed or diminished by human activities.

This time, she made clear, the asteroid is us — and we will pay heavily for our folly.

Humanity’s culpability in what many scientists believe to be a planetary emergency has now been reaffirmed by a detailed and depressing report compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies. A summary was released last Monday in Paris, and the full 1,500-page report will be available later in the year. Its findings are grim. “Biodiversity” — a word encompassing all living flora and fauna — “is declining faster than at any time in human history,” it says, estimating that “around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades,” unless the world takes transformative action to save natural systems. The at-risk population includes a half-million land-based species and one-third of marine mammals and corals.

Most of the causes of this carnage seem familiar: logging, poaching, overfishing by large industrial fleets, pollution, invasive species, the spread of roads and cities to accommodate an exploding global population, now 7 billion and rising. If there is one alpha culprit, it is the clearing of forests and wetlands for farms to feed all those people (and, perversely, to help them get to work: The destruction of Indonesia’s valuable rain forests, and their replacement with palm oil plantations, has been driven in part by Europe’s boundless appetite for biodiesel fuels.)

Add to all this a relatively new threat: Global warming, driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels, is expected to compound the damage. “While climate change has not been the dominant driver of biodiversity loss to date in most parts of the world, it is projected to become as or more important,” said Sir Robert Watson, chairman of the biodiversity panel and former chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose most recent alarming report on global warming has given that issue new currency in American politics. Rising seas and increased extreme weather events propelled in part by climate change — fire, floods, droughts — have already harmed many species. The most obvious victim is the world’s coral reefs, which have suffered grievously from ocean waters that have grown warmer and more acidic as a result of all the carbon dioxide they’ve been asked to absorb.

As The Times’ Brad Plumer recently noted, many ecologists insist that species are worth saving on their own, that it’s simply morally wrong to drive any living creature to extinction. The new report deliberately adds a powerful practical motive to the spiritual one: Biodiversity loss, it says, is an urgent issue for human well-being, providing billions and billions of dollars in what experts call “ecosystem services.” Wetlands clean and purify water. Coral reefs nourish vast fish populations that feed the world. Organic matter in the soil nourishes crops. Bees and other threatened insects pollinate fruits and vegetables. Mangroves protect us from floods made worse by rising seas.

“Most of nature’s contributions are not fully replaceable,” the report says. But humans can stop or at least limit the damage. One critical task is to protect (and if possible to enlarge) the world’s natural forests, which, according to a recent paper by eminent ecologists in Science Advance, are home to fully two-thirds of the world’s species. Intact forests also absorb and store enormous amounts of carbon, so preserving them assists not only the species that live there but also the struggle against climate change. Conversely, cutting trees to make way for farming and other purposes — as Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, is determined to do in the Amazon — is a disaster for both the species and the climate; recent estimates suggest that deforestation accounts for slightly over 10% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, much smaller than the emissions from vehicles and power plants, but significant (and avoidable) nonetheless.

To Watson and many other scientists, there are two important parallel approaches to the interconnected climate and species crises. One is to transform agricultural practices, the other is to enlarge the world’s supply of legally protected landscapes that cannot be touched for any commercial purpose. As to the first, farmers could figure out how to produce more food on fewer acres, and in ways that help the soil retain carbon; consumers could help by making smarter food choices, like eating more locally sourced food, and cutting back on meat and dairy products that require immense amounts of land for livestock.

Second, governments should mandate a significant increase in protected areas, both on land and at sea. Partly as a result of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a treaty agreed upon in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro along with a landmark agreement on climate change, nations have set aside about 15% of the world’s land and 7% of its oceans by setting up wilderness areas and nature preserves. Because this is only a fraction of the areas needed to protect biodiversity, the authors of the paper in Science Advance recommend a twofold increase in the protected land area and a fourfold increase in marine reserves over the next decade. If rigorously policed (which many parks are not today), that would effectively quarantine about 30% of the world’s land and oceans.

This proposal, which its authors call a Global Deal for Nature (echoing the Democrats’ Green New Deal on climate), will be further refined before the next meeting of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2020 in China. Though it always sends a delegation to these meetings, the United States has never ratified the treaty; President Bill Clinton signed it in 1993, but the Republican Senate failed to ratify it for various reasons, including unfounded fears that the treaty threatened American patent and intellectual property rights.

It is hard to believe that the Trump administration and the current Senate will be any more enthusiastic about preserving biodiversity than the Senate was then. This is an administration, after all, that has proposed to shrink national monuments and reduce protections for the imperiled sage grouse in order to accommodate the oil, gas and coal industries; that is moving to open up the species-rich coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling; that plans to make available now-protected waters along America’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts for the same purpose; that proposes to sacrifice parts of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging; that, most tellingly, aims to weaken the Endangered Species Act, approved in 1973 with Richard Nixon’s signature in what seems a distant era when there was fairly deep bipartisan support for environmental values.

Few of the Democratic presidential hopefuls who have spoken about climate change and jumped with varying degrees of enthusiasm on the Green New Deal bandwagon have commented on the biodiversity report, despite biodiversity’s obvious connections to climate. They should read it, and make it part of their post-2020 agenda.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/opinion/sunday/extinction-endangered-species-biodiversity.html" id="3e175491-26be-3b92-a83c-5f3ddc918d4e">The New York Times</a>.

Life as We Know It

President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on Chinese imports, which took effect at 12:01 a.m. ET Friday, are taxes that will be paid by Americans. That is a simple fact, and it remains true no matter how many times Trump insists the money will come from China.

Trump’s latest escalation of his trade fight with China is a 25% tariff, or import tax, on products that compose about one-third of China’s exports to the United States, including Chinese bicycles, circuit boards and wooden doors. The tariff rate on those goods was previously 10%. Trump also has threatened to impose the 25% rate on virtually all products imported from China — more than $500 billion in goods last year.

Trump could make an honest case for this tax increase. He could argue that Americans must endure higher prices because China will suffer too — while China does not bear the direct cost of the tariffs, it is likely to suffer a loss of sales — and the United States needs that leverage as it presses China to change its economic policies.

Instead, Trump continues to repeat the false claim that the money will come from China, even though he has been told repeatedly that this claim has no basis in fact. He is willfully peddling a falsehood for political gain.

The mechanics of tariffs are not complicated: The government sends a tax bill to the company that brings goods into the country. Most of those tax bills go to U.S. companies, often import firms that specialize in dealing with the customs process.

It doesn’t really matter who gets the bill, however. The important question is where the money to pay it comes from. And in broad terms, there are only two options: It comes either from the firms that make, move and sell the products or from the pockets of the buyers.

Consider the case of washing machines. In January 2018, Trump imposed a tariff on washing machines, initially at a rate of 20%. The tariff caused a 12% increase in the price of washing machines, according to a study by economists at the Federal Reserve and the University of Chicago. It also resulted in a similar increase in the price of dryers. Americans responded by buying more domestic washing machines, creating about 1,800 new jobs. But the cost of the tariffs was borne entirely by U.S. consumers. The study estimated that each of those new jobs came at a cost of more than $815,000.

The Trump administration has tried to focus the China tariffs on the industrial supply chain: products used in making other goods, rather than products sold directly to consumers. That means much of the cost initially is absorbed by faceless corporations.

But the bottom line remains either lower profits or higher prices.

Some of the money could, in theory, be squeezed from Chinese manufacturers. But a pair of recent studies by prominent academics, including the chief economist at the World Bank, have concluded that the full cost of the Trump tariffs is being paid here in the United States, although China has suffered a loss of access to the U.S. market.

One of the studies concluded that the cost of the tariffs has fallen disproportionately on the parts of the country that have supported Trump most strongly, in part because China and other nations subjected to tariffs have targeted their retaliatory tariffs at agricultural products and other goods produced in those parts of the country.

The cost of a tax is not just the money extracted from the private sector but also the disruption of economic activity. Here, too, the tariffs are proving painful. The second study estimated that tariffs were extracting $3 billion a month from U.S. companies and consumers — and causing an additional $1.4 billion a month in lost economic activity.

Trump’s tariffs also have prompted China to retaliate, and that is causing particular pain for Midwestern farmers who have lost a major market for their crops.

Trump tweeted Friday that the federal government would collect $100 billion in tariff revenue and that he would use some of the money to purchase U.S. agricultural products, which would then be shipped to “poor &amp; starving countries.” The rest of the money, he said, could be used for “Infrastructure, Health care or anything else.”

It’s a good idea to raise taxes to pay for foreign aid, infrastructure and health care.

But a tariff is a consumption tax, much like a sales tax, and such taxes tend to be regressive, meaning they cost lower-income families a larger share of their income than they cost upper-income families. There are better ways to raise the money. For example, the ill-considered tax cuts for the wealthy that Trump pushed through Congress in 2017 could be reversed.

Moreover, there is growing reason to doubt that tariffs are serving Trump’s stated purpose of persuading China to change its trade policies. There is widespread agreement, both in the United States and among U.S. allies, that China is engaged in unfair practices, such as state-subsidized manufacturing, theft of intellectual property, and both formal and informal constraints on foreign businesses. Those are real problems, and enforceable commitments to enact reforms could deliver significant economic and environmental benefits. Trump’s tariffs could yet prove a painful success story.

But the cost of Trump’s approach has just gone up: Americans will be paying higher prices on a wide range of goods. And Trump — who famously declared in March 2018 that “trade wars are good, and easy to win” — has yet to show he can strike a deal.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/opinion/trump-china-trade-tariff.html" id="741bd76f-fca5-346c-a795-76e7cc667bce">The New York Times</a>.

Trump’s Tariffs Are a New Tax on Americans

President Donald Trump is right: There is a crisis at the southern border. Just not the one he rants about.

There is no pressing national security threat — no invasion of murderers, drug cartels or terrorists. No matter how often Trump delivers such warnings, they bear little resemblance to the truth.

But as record numbers of Central American families flee violence and poverty in their homelands, they are overwhelming U.S. border systems, fueling a humanitarian crisis of overcrowding, disease and chaos. The Border Patrol is averaging 1,200 daily arrests, with many migrants arriving exhausted and sick. Last week, a teenage boy from Guatemala died in government custody, the third death of a minor since December. As resources are strained and the system buckles, the misery grows.

Something needs to be done. Soon. Unfortunately, political gamesmanship once again threatens to hold up desperately needed resources.

On Wednesday, the White House sent Congress a request for $4.5 billion in emergency funding to help manage the surge. In a letter to lawmakers, the acting director of the White House’s budget office, Russell Vought, sought to convey the scope of the challenge. “In February, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered more than 76,000 illegal border crossers and inadmissible aliens, and in March that number exceeded 100,000 — the highest monthly level in more than a decade,” Vought wrote. He described what he said were “alarming numbers” of women and children jammed into Border Patrol stations never intended as long-term shelters.

Funding for vital services is not expected to last through the fiscal year, Vought said. Most urgently, the program that deals with unaccompanied minors is expected to run dry next month, requiring resources to be diverted from other programs and leading to a further deterioration in conditions.

While the request is light on specifics, it does draw some important outlines. Nearly three-quarters of the funds, $3.3 billion, would be earmarked for humanitarian needs, with much of it flowing to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency responsible for unaccompanied minors. None of the money would go toward Trump’s border wall.

Several hundred million dollars would, however, go toward shoring up border security operations, including increasing the number of detention beds overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. This, for Democrats, is a nonstarter.

The debate over the permissible size of the detainee population has grown white hot. Democrats contend that the president brought this housing crisis on himself with his push to scoop up as many noncitizens as possible, rather than prioritizing those considered dangerous, as previous administrations did. Instead of asking for more money, Democrats assert, ICE should redirect existing resources to the border.

Detention beds were a sticking point in this winter’s budget negotiations as well, ultimately resulting in a convoluted compromise no one seemed to understand. Since then, the issue has festered as the administration has adopted policies that will further swell the detainee population, such as last month’s order for immigration judges to keep more migrants locked up while their asylum claims are processed, rather than allow them to post bail.

The Democratic chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, Nita Lowey of New York, said the administration was seeking billions of dollars to “double down on cruel and ill-conceived policies” and bail out ICE for locking up more migrant families than it could humanely accommodate. But until better policies are in place, Democrats need to find a way to provide money for adequate shelter.

Democrats have other, lower-level concerns as well, such as ensuring that the Office of Refugee Resettlement is not used as an enforcement agency or that the contractors and facilities used to care for children meet certain standards. As a condition of handing over additional billions, they are likely to push for at least modest increases in oversight. They should aim to keep such tinkering as narrow and targeted as possible. If the White House is serious about needing the money, it should be prepared to agree to a few conditions — and convey the need for flexibility to Senate Republicans.

As for the clash over detention beds: Knowing how toxic the matter is, the White House would have been wise to leave it out of a request it needs to advance quickly, postponing that battle for a another day. Both sides need to dial back the fighting words, resist the temptation to finger-point and find a creative way through this minefield.

A Very Modern Waste of Tax Dollars

When Californians place an online order with Best Buy, they pay the company and they pay a state sales tax. What the receipt doesn’t say is that Best Buy gets some of the sales tax, too.

California distributes a portion of sales tax revenue to local governments, based on the location of sales. In 2015, Best Buy agreed to keep a distribution warehouse in the small city of Dinuba, and to credit its online sales to that location. In exchange, Dinuba agreed to give Best Buy 45 percent of its share of the resulting sales tax revenue.

Companies including Apple, Macy’s and QVC have struck similar deals with other California municipalities, according to a recent investigation by Bloomberg Tax. A consultant to the League of California Cities estimates that corporations are now receiving more than $1 billion a year in such payouts — more than 20 percent of the total local share of sales tax revenue.

The tax deals are a facet of a much larger problem: the incredibly wasteful competition among state and local governments to lure and keep corporations. Everyone (well, everyone except corporations) would be better off if states prevented local governments from offering such incentives, and if the federal government deterred states from doing so, for example by taxing state and local incentives. So long as such incentives are legal, the result is an endless game of beggar-thy-neighbors-and-thyself.

In the case of California sales taxes, the internet supersized an old problem. Governments across the country have long offered sales tax kickbacks, for example to lure an auto dealership from a neighboring town. Before the internet, however, the benefit was limited to sales at that location. In the age of e-commerce, one warehouse may serve the whole state.

Most states allocate sales tax revenue based on the location of the buyer. California is among a handful of states that uses the location of the seller. That effectively lets online retailers pick a city to get the tax revenue — and to sell the rights to the highest bidder.

Apple, for example, assigns the taxes from its California sales to its headquarters city, Cupertino, in exchange for a 35 percent kickback. Macy’s gets a 50 percent kickback from Sacramento County. Ulta, which sells beauty products, gets up to 75 percent back from Fresno.

A bill proposed by state Sen. Steven Glazer, and backed by the League of California Cities, would prohibit new deals of this kind, though it would allow existing deals to be renewed — and would still allow kickbacks to brick-and-mortar retailers.

The league’s logic is that assigning online sales to a single location allows cities to steal from one another. Beyond that, it says, local governments still should have the same right as state governments and the federal government to determine the use of tax dollars. A 2013 California law requires local governments to publish the details of any tax incentive over $100,000, along with an analysis of costs and benefits, and to hold a hearing. If voters don’t like what they see, the argument goes, they are free to vote the bums out.

(California also could adopt the more common system for allocating sales tax revenue, but cities with warehouses argue that they bear the costs, and deserve the money.)

The bill is surely a step in the right direction, but its proponents should heed the logic of their own proposal. The purpose of all sales tax kickbacks is to compete with other cities.

And the competition does not just shift tax dollars from place to place — it decreases the total pool of sales tax dollars by giving some of the money to corporations.

Companies, and cities, cannot be expected to exercise restraint under the current rules. The real answer is for California, and every other state, to prohibit local sales tax kickbacks.

De Blasio May Want to Be President. What Do His Donors Want?

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s flirtation with a White House run has generated virtually no interest among voters. One national poll in March found he was the only Democratic candidate with a net negative approval rating, though fewer than half those polled had any opinion of him at all.

But his potential candidacy has caught the attention of people who do business with the city. They’ve been donating to the mayor’s presidential political action committee, the federal Fairness PAC, his latest vehicle for raising money from powerful interests.

De Blasio’s lowly showing in the polls didn’t, for example, dissuade John F. Fish, chief executive of Suffolk Construction, a Boston-based company, from hosting a fundraiser last month for the mayor’s PAC. Fish’s company is clearly hoping to expand its business in New York — Suffolk recently hired Shola Olatoye, who led the city’s public housing authority until last year — and may see an opportunity to win favor with a current mayor and future presidential candidate.

What’s disconcerting, however, is why de Blasio would welcome such donations, given the risk of even the appearance of impropriety, not to mention the fact that his fundraising has raised ethical and legal questions since he first ran for mayor in 2013.

A donor to his first mayoral campaign pleaded guilty to bribing him to get favorable lease terms for a Queens restaurant. Federal prosecutors indicated that they didn’t charge the mayor because the Supreme Court had recently narrowed the scope of what could be considered corruption.

A donor to one of the nonprofits the mayor has used to advance his liberal agenda and raise his profile pleaded guilty to charges involving bribery after receiving special access to de Blasio and city officials.

The city’s Department of Investigation found that the mayor violated conflict of interest rules by soliciting donations for his Campaign for One New York from people seeking favors from the city, as the news site The City recently revealed. (The rules would not apply to the presidential PAC.)

That’s not to mention the Manhattan district attorney’s announcement in 2017 that the mayor’s fundraising for the Democratic campaign to win the state Senate in 2014 violated the “intent and spirit” of campaign finance laws by directing contributions meant for political committees toward specific candidates.

Fundraising can taint City Hall by giving the appearance of pay-to-play, even if none is involved.

In 2015, the city lifted a deed restriction that allowed a Lower East Side nursing home that once served AIDS patients to be converted to condos. Among those who had pushed for the deed change was lobbyist James Capalino, who steered $40,000 to de Blasio’s 2017 re-election campaign and $10,000 to the Campaign for One New York. Capalino has said that the client he worked for who sought the deed change fired him in 2014 after he was unsuccessful, and that he wasn’t involved in the issue afterward. City Comptroller Scott Stringer investigated the land deal and blamed it on mismanagement by city officials.

De Blasio, who is barred by term limits from seeking re-election, is using his federal Fairness PAC to pay for his travel to states like Iowa and Nevada, which will be important if he runs for president. De Blasio has said the group will not accept contributions from anyone in a database of those doing business with New York City, a stricter standard than the federal rules the group must follow.

But that database, called “Doing Business,” doesn’t include every individual or group with business before the city. Frank Carone, for example, a lawyer representing two owners of 21 buildings the city bought to provide affordable housing, is a longtime de Blasio supporter who has been helping raise money for Fairness PAC. He donated $5,000 to the PAC in September, as the deal was under negotiation.

A campaign spokesman for de Blasio says Carone wasn’t listed as a lobbyist in the “Doing Business” database when he made the $5,000 donation. Last month, the de Blasio administration agreed to pay the landlords $173 million for the 21 buildings — a price a third higher than the $115 million they were appraised for by an independent firm on the city’s behalf.

A de Blasio spokeswoman, Freddi Goldstein, disputed the idea that donors receive special favors at City Hall. “All official decisions are made based on merit,” Goldstein said.

But the ease with which the mayor continues to accept donations from people seeking business before the city is disquieting, even if the fundraising breaks no laws.

The field of candidates seeking the Democratic nomination is already large. If de Blasio chooses to run, he will have to find a way to assure voters that he has their interests — not those of his big donors — at heart.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/05/opinion/trump-border-crisis-funding.html" id="4de40deb-e2d1-3cdd-a5a3-898d0eac287f">The New York Times</a>.

Congress, Give Trump His Border Money

The global anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International describes Paraguay as a “monolith in the study of corruption,” a country that offers a case study on the difficulty of recovering from a dictatorship that institutionalized corruption. Such studies may have to write a new chapter now that Paraguayans have introduced new weapons into the battle — toilet paper and eggs.

Paraguay, a small, landlocked country of fewer than 7 million people in the middle of South America, has a long history of conflicts, revolutions and coups d’état followed by 35 years of autocratic government under Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, a serial violator of human rights who actively promoted corruption. “Corruption,” he would argue, “is the price for peace.”

The country has not yet thrown off that yoke, despite some earnest efforts. Several institutions have been set up to fight corruption, but they have run up against deeply entrenched habits of graft in politics and the judiciary. On Transparency International’s “corruption perceptions index,” which measures public perception of official corruption, Paraguay, in a tie with Bolivia, ranks above only Venezuela in South America. And according to Latinobarómetro, a Latin American polling organization, Paraguayans have one of the lowest levels of support for democracy in Latin America. Stroessner’s Colorado Party has been in power for all but four years since he was overthrown in a military coup in 1989 — the current president, Mario Abdo Benítez, belongs to a conservative wing of the party; his father was the dictator’s personal secretary.

That does not mean that Paraguayans, or their elected leaders, are necessarily congenitally hooked on graft and bribery as a way of life. What it does mean is that countries with long histories of rampant and systemic corruption, often as a result of autocratic government, face huge obstacles in eradicating the blight, since it infects the very institutions, political and judicial, that are needed to fight it.

Maria Esther Roa did not despair. As reported by Ernesto Londoño and Santi Carneri in The Times, Roa, a criminal lawyer in Paraguay, and some other organizers, most of them women, decided that enough was enough when a Sen. José María Ibañez, who admitted using public funds to pay employees at his country estate, survived a vote of impeachment. Since responsible institutions were not responding, Roa decided to try public humiliation.

On the day after the impeachment vote failed, she and some fellow activists gathered outside Ibañez’s home, banging on pots and pans, chanting “Down with Ibañez!” and covering the house with toilet paper and raw eggs, which soon began to stink. To their amazement, he resigned.

Two other senators followed; prosecutors soon filed charges against five other officials and opened investigations on several more. As the doorstep protests, known as escraches, multiplied and spread on social media, politicians and their spouses began finding themselves unwelcome at fancy restaurants or beauty salons.

Opponents of the escraches have responded that they can turn violent, that reputations are being destroyed without a hearing, that families are being terrorized. Indeed, there has been some violence, both by protesters and against them, which worries Roa. But in a society that seems locked in an unbreakable cycle of corruption, she and her colleagues view protest and public humiliation as weapons of last resort. “At least now we have hope,” said one activist. “Before there was no hope.”

If it works, little Paraguay may find itself listed as a “monolith in the study of overcoming corruption.” Scanning Transparency International’s list, there’s no shortage of countries that sorely need a jolt to break habits of graft, bribery and impunity.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/28/opinion/paraguay-corruption.html" id="8bb8c44a-32ce-334c-afcb-3bc158be97ab">The New York Times</a>.

In Paraguay, Long a Haven for Corruption, Popular Protests Get Results

This month, Saudi Arabia’s oil company, Aramco, revealed that it generated $111.1 billion in net income last year, making it the world’s most profitable company by far. So it is not particularly surprising that a scant six months after the killing and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by government goons stunned the world, businesses and banks are once again courting the kingdom.

Hundreds of investors lined up this month to bid in Aramco’s first bond sale; among businesses humming in the kingdom, movie theater giant AMC is moving ahead with plans for 40 new theaters, and Google is working on a data center. “The fact that there are issues in the press does not tell me I must run away from a place. In many cases it tells me I should run to and invest because what we are most frightened of are things that we don’t talk about,” explained Larry Fink, the BlackRock chief executive, who created waves this year when he argued that business must provide leadership on social and political issues.

Fink’s statement appeared to be a variation on what many other corporate barons have used as justification for working with the de facto Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — that they are helping Saudis to reform and modernize their society. In that context, it might be instructive to revisit some of the “issues in the press.”

Let us set aside for the moment the strong indications provided by U.S. and Turkish intelligence that Prince Mohammed was behind Khashoggi’s murder, which he denies. The purported modernization decreed by the prince has been accompanied by a broad campaign of arrests, trials, convictions and executions.

On Tuesday, the official Saudi news agency announced that 37 men, nearly all from the minority Shiite Muslim community, had been executed on terrorism-related charges. Executions in Saudi Arabia are usually by beheading, often in public, and the Interior Ministry said one man was also crucified, something reserved for the most grievous crimes.

According to Human Rights Watch, 11 of the men were charged with spying for Iran and 14 in connection with protests during the Arab Spring of 2011. Some of the convictions were based on confessions that the men withdrew in court, saying they had been tortured. One of those beheaded was Mujtaba al-Sweikat, who was 17 and preparing to enter Western Michigan University when he was arrested in 2012 after attending a pro-democracy rally.

The most-heralded evidence of modernization under Prince Mohammed was his lifting of a ban on women driving. The very fact that there was such a ban is ridiculous, but a few weeks before it was ended, in May 2018, several women’s rights activists were rounded up — including women who had campaigned against the driving ban — and accused of crimes against the kingdom.

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