Trump playing dangerous game in fighting all traditional media - New York Magazine

As this election year gears down toward a frenzied conclusion, one of the constants of modern American politics, Republican demonization of the mainstream news media as “biased,” is reaching a new level of savagery at the hands of Donald Trump.

Commenting on the tone of Trump rallies this week, Politico’s Ben Schreckinger was clearly shaken by the anti-media hate fever:

As the Republican nominee has resorted to more extreme denunciations of the press in recent days, his supporters have followed suit. Chants of “CNN sucks” have become commonplace at Trump’s rallies this week and members of the traveling press were called “whores” and “press-titutes” as they filed out of a Thursday afternoon rally in West Palm Beach. Minutes before, Trump had accused reporters of participating in a vast globalist conspiracy against his campaign and American workers.

No, it’s not just rootless cosmopolitans and international bankers who are in league with Crooked Hillary to destroy the U.S. economy and keep the white man down. It’s also the media folk who made the second presidential debate a “one-on-three” unequal battle, as Trump self-pityingly (or more likely, cynically) argued in accosting the two moderators.

Crowds that once booed and shouted at the press mainly at Trump’s prompting — when he would decry them as “dishonest” and “scum” or demand that television cameras pan his crowds — have now begun spontaneously targeting the press on their own, at a scale not yet seen in this campaign, or any in memory on American soil.

Now Ben Schreckinger is pretty young, and so cannot remember George Wallace’s presidential campaigns, wherein it was standard procedure for the candidate to point out liberal Yankee reporters to his angry supporters at campaign events. But Wallace seemed to be toying with mainstream media figures rather than actively threatening them, and he was never a major-party presidential nominee, either.

It is also hard to think of a precedent for a presidential candidate who has made the game of “beat the press” (to borrow the name of Dean Baker’s blog, which aims a critical but judicious eye at economics reporting) so integral and multifaceted a part of his campaign. The immediate motive for the latest bout of Trumpian media-bashing is to counter the drumbeat of new allegations about the mogul’s crude and possibly illegal sexual behavior and his habit of saying creepy things about women. What the media ought to be covering, say Trump and his surrogates, is the WikiLeaks disclosures of Clinton campaign emails. But the broader trend in the Trump camp’s rhetoric is to go “full Breitbart”: to regard all “Establishment” politicians and media outlets, even those normally thought of as conservatives, as part of a conspiracy to defend the status quo. For readers who have risked singed hair and shocked sensibilities by reading the website recently run by Trump’s campaign chairman Stephen Bannon, Breitbart.com turns the volume of media-hatred right up to 11.

Arguably these developments are mainly of interest to journalists who with good reason fear that their ability to do their jobs — and perhaps even their liberty — could be at risk if Trump somehow wins. But there is growing danger to the integrity of the election itself, and to civic peace on and after November 8.

The same allegedly lying and conspiring media who are tormenting poor Trump are the people who will report on and interpret the elections toward which we are barreling. Trump has already conspicuously warned that the election is “rigged” or will be “stolen” and is stirring up his supporters to police voting sites for signs of chicanery. To be sure, “voter fraud” is mostly imaginary, but it’s an emotionally powerful symbol of white fears that minority folk will be herded by their government-benefit paymasters to the polls to vote themselves more welfare (and/or less immigration enforcement).

Let’s say the Breitbartians gin up some real Election Day hysteria about the “rigged” or “stolen” election, and it merges with rumors or even reports of election-machinery hacking — say, from somewhere in the vicinity of Russia. You have all the ingredients for a disputed election, and perhaps real and widespread violence. After all, if the people telling us what’s happening are part of a conspiracy to change what’s happening, what other recourse does the frightened patriot have?

In the first presidential debate Trump famously promised not only to accept defeat if it comes to pass, but to “support” a President-elect Hillary Clinton if there is one. But he began backing away from that pledge almost immediately, and it is getting hard to imagine him on November 9 telling his supporters to stop demanding Clinton’s incarceration and begin treating her as a legitimate chief executive. Besides, it was one of those lying debate moderators who ambushed Trump with the question about accepting Clinton, and you can’t trust any of them, can you?

How Stronger Unions Could Fix Our Economy — And Our Politics - TIME Business

How Stronger Unions Could Fix Our Economy — And Our Politics

Posted: 11 Oct 2016 04:00 AM PDT

Of the little we’ve heard, much of this election’s economic policy discussion has focused on what can be done about our historically slow growth, rising inequality, and decreasing social mobility. But neither candidate has focused on one no-brainer solution: strengthening unions.
That might seem a contentious statement in a country with decades of fraught relations between corporations and labor. But as a new report from the left-leaning Center for American Progress outlines, a stronger labor movement may be the quickest way to spur the sort of broad-based growth (via wage hikes) that we need to create a more sustainable, robust recovery.

“It’s become pretty clear that in order to raise wages and reduce inequality, the number one thing that we could do would be to increase worker power within our economy,” says David Madland, a senior fellow at CAP and the author of the study.
Strengthening unions might also have the knock-on effect of decreasing populism. At least some of the ugliness we’ve seen this election cycle has been rooted in rising inequality. Meanwhile, about one-third of the recent increase in wage inequality for American males can be attributed to weakening unions, according to research by Harvard and Washington University academics. A separate IMF study found that countries without unions see a 10% increase in the share of income that goes to the highest earners.
By contrast, the social benefits of unions stretch across generations. American children of fathers without a college education earn 28% more if their dad was in a labor union, compared to those whose fathers were non-union. In other words, the demise of American unions — only about 7% of private sector workers currently belong to one — has been a key factor in the rising wealth gap, but also in the sort of horrific, Hobbesian presidential politics we’ve seen over the past year. (Many economists see the wealth gap as a big reason why we aren’t enjoying a more sustainable recovery.)
The big challenge to revitalizing unions is moving beyond today’s system of labor law, which hasn’t been updated since 1935. Unions get a bad rap in the U.S. in part because most collective bargaining can be done only at a firm-by-firm level. That creates a race to the bottom away from higher-wage unionized firms. Yet there is a wealth of research that shows that when bargaining can be done at an industry level — the way it is in most other countries, including Germany, Sweden, Australia, and Canada, among others — you get higher national wages without sacrificing economic competitiveness. That’s because factors like labor representation on corporate boards and the ability to bargain collectively is associated with greater productivity levels, as management and labor are better able to work together to solve problems. (See here for an example of how this helped German companies gain market share against U.S. firms in the wake of the financial crisis.)
Such a drastic change won’t be easy. Reforming the National Labor Relations Board will require policy action. “Legal changes [to collective bargaining structures] have to come first – unions simply aren’t powerful enough right now to drive this change on their own,” says Madland. Yet there are already examples at the state and local level that show the potential of a new kind of labor movement. Think about the Fight for $15 movement in various cities, which has helped bolster low-end service pay across industries. It’s something that Hillary (fingers crossed) should make a top priority if she’s elected. It would help stabilize our economy — and our democracy, too.